A Life Cycle Costing Approach of Potential Carbon Capture and Storage at the Hunter Unit 3 Coal-Fired Power Plant, Utah

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a detailed life cycle costing methodology for CCS projects that can be applied to other contexts.

🏢実務担当者:Demonstrates the importance of policy certainty for CCS investment decisions, useful for corporate energy transition planning.

🏛政策担当者:Emphasizes that stable, long-term tax credits are critical to de-risk CCS investments and attract private capital.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is widely regarded as a viable pathway for reducing greenhouse gas emissions; however, large-scale deployment remains constrained by project economics and policy uncertainty. This study presents a life cycle costing assessment of a proposed CCS retrofit at the Hunter Unit 3 coal-fired power plant in Emery County, Utah, encompassing carbon capture, transport, and subsurface storage. Results indicate that the project appears economically favorable under the assumptions of this screening-level analysis and under current policy conditions, with an estimated break-even time of approximately five years. The analysis identifies a large upfront capital investment exceeding $600,000,000, offset by planned revenue from federal tax credits totaling several billion dollars over the project lifetime. Sensitivity analyses show that project economics are dominated by capture costs and annual mass of CO2 sequestration rates, while storage and transport costs play secondary roles. A synthetic policy-perturbation analysis of the $85/ton tax credit further demonstrates that policy volatility materially increases uncertainty in investment returns. These results highlight both the economic potential of CCS retrofits at existing power plants and the critical role of stable long-term policy in enabling investment.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/en19092010first seen 2026-05-05 19:29:45