Value Chain Analysis Of Co2 Storage By Using The Ecco Tool: Storage Economics

The ECCO Tool [1, 2] has been developed in the "ECCO - European value chain for CO2" project [3]. ECCO was a collaborating project under the 7th framework programme for research of the EU. The ECCO Tool is a software program designed to evaluate quantitatively the post-tax economics of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects for each of the mutually dependent actors along the CCS value chain. The main objective of ECCO is to facilitate robust strategic decision-making regarding early and future deployment of CO2 value chains [4].The tool is designed to have a level of detail that is appropriate for studying the economic feasibility of well-defined CCS projects to be executed by commercial companies, studying whether or not to invest in (part of) the value chain and, if so, under which contractual conditions. The tool integrates cost engineering, transport and well/reservoir physics, planning (including the impact of contracts and physics on the sizing and timing of capex and opex), and full post-tax economics (including macro-and micro-economics).The ECCO Tool is also aimed at giving insight to national and European policy makers on their possible role in "closing the chain", i.e., how they may contribute, through subsidies, guarantees, regulation or otherwise, to achieve a satisfactory risk and/or reward for the actors involved in a chain. Finally, the tool can also be used by authorities to estimate the potential of CCS in realizing overall policy objectives (e.g. meeting ETS objectives, amount of government stimulation needed, jobs created, etc).The subsurface module consists of three storage options, depleted gas field (DGF), aquifer and storage by enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In order to have a realistic behavior of the subsurface operator, automatic decision algorithms are included in the subsurface module. In order to meet the contractual obligations of the storage operator, e.g. to store a volume of CO2 within a certain period, incremental investments may be needed. These incremental investments depend on physical and contractual state-variables that are calculated as output of the subsurface module. Decision algorithms for incremental investments can be formulated such that the actual decisions are triggered as a function of these state variables. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.