Phase-based design of CO capture, transport, and storage infrastructure via SimCCS.

The design of optimal infrastructure is essential for the deployment of commercial and large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. During the design process, it is important to consider CO capture and storage locations and CO transportation pipelines to minimize the total project cost. SimCCS, first introduced in 2009, is an integrated open-source tool to optimize CCS infrastructure. The core CCS infrastructure design problem in SimCCS is structured as a mixed-integer linear programming problem by selecting the optimal pipeline routes, searching CO source capture and storage locations, and determining the corresponding CO amounts to meet desired capture targets. Multiple important and practical features have been developed to the latest version of SimCCS, SimCCS. One of these features is phase-based modeling which enables users to dynamically design the CCS infrastructure. We demonstrate the phased-based modeling capability using two CCS infrastructure optimization case studies. The results from these case studies reveal that the phase-based modeling capability in SimCCS is particularly useful to optimize the dynamic deployment of CCS projects.