Technical Report 216, c4e-Preprint Series, Cambridge

Authors: Rebecca Kächele, Daniel Nurkowski, Jacob W. Martin, Jethro Akroyd, and Markus Kraft

Reference: Technical Report 216, c4e-Preprint Series, Cambridge, 2018

Associated Themes:
 

• Economic feasibility study of using algae and biochar burial strategies to offset carbon emission from the use of conventional fossil-derived transport fuels.
• Costs associated with the carbon capture/offset via algae and biochar burial are estimated.
• The biochar burial approach was found to be more economically viable than the algae burial.

This work presents an economic feasibility study of using algae and biochar burial strategies to offset carbon emission from the use of conventional fossil-derived transport fuels. The economic feasibility is quantified on the basis that the final price of the decarbonised fossil-derived diesel that should be lower or equal to the price of biodiesel which is deemed as the next best alternative. The extra costs associated with the carbon capture/offset via algae and biochar burial are estimated for the most typical scenarios using the economic models developed as part of this work. In addition, High Dimensional Model Representation (HDMR) based global sensitivity analyses are performed in order to quantify an influence of key model parameters on the overall costs. It was found that using the algae burial strategy to offset carbon emission is at the moment not practical because it would at least double the current diesel price. This is mainly due to the high costs of pumping diluted algae slurry underground. The biochar burial approach, on the other hand, was found to be much more economically viable as it only increases the conventional diesel price by a small amount. This comparably low price is due to the revenue generated from selling the electricity produced from the pyrolysis by-products. In addition, the global sensitivity analysis revealed that the overall costs were the most sensitive to the wood price, as the wood feedstock may either be an income or an expenditure.

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