Deployment of Low and Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power Generation in Emerging Niche Markets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The opportunities for near-term implementation of low and zero-emission fossil fuel power generation using Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is emerging in niche markets. This is primarily motivated by regulations following a growing awareness regarding the potential impact of climate-change, and partly the opportunities for use of carbon-dioxide (CO2) with enhanced oil recovery (EOR). However there remain significant technology, engineering, investment and political barriers that need to be overcome before CCS can be accepted as commercially mature for the power generation industry and the finance community. The risk with early projects is high, while collaboration and trust between government, industry and investors will also be needed to commercialize the technology. With an emerging sense of urgency regarding a global consensus for tackling climate-change, one also observes that technology pathways are integrated with political agendas and it becomes important to roadmap a commercial strategy for the respective technologies taking account of government requirements for compromise and burden sharing. To some extent this can also impact on comparative choices for the most cost-effective technologies that are supported through to future commercial deployment. The situation is complicated by the fact that technology choice—be it pre-combustion, post-combustion or oxy-combustion—remains an open question, where parties are probably influenced by their historical expertise, available hardware and near-term perception of future carbon challenge. The fact that energy, materials and engineering costs have been escalating rapidly while there is also a fundamental paradigm change occurring, somewhat undermines the use of historical data and past experience to predict business opportunities for the future. Within this context the paper considers on-going carbon market evolution in three regions, namely Texas, North Europe and Canada, seen from a technology and project developer perspective. The paper applies updated project engineering costs for capture from natural gas (NG) and coal using post- and oxy-combustion technology. Under all circumstances projects still exhibit poor economic return on invested capital and depend on government participation; they therefore remain unattractive to the investment community. But perhaps more important is the current perception of technology and market risk which also appears to undermine motivation to make significant commitments when evaluating projects within the old paradigm. However such a situation is not politically sustainable and a new paradigm must emerge. This will occur through regulation and significant changes in pricing in the energy and commodity market—including valuation of captured and avoided CO2. And this will also impact on the relative merits of various technology options. For the time being these discussion and results are only indicative of how a new paradigm and evolving technology may become “game-changing”, but the paper does attempt to provide some foresight into future opportunities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".