Carbon Policy Assessment in Process Integration

The rising concerns about climate change have led to the emergence of several pathways for mitigating the increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, especially CO₂. Several technologies and actions constitute such pathways, whether through reducing the production of CO₂ streams by implementing renewable energy options for example or through processing them via CO₂ capture, utilization, and storage. For such projects to be implemented, they need to satisfy an economic favourability that serves as an incentive for the industrial stakeholders to invest. Process Integration tools have been developed recently to optimize the planning of CO₂ reduction through identifying the cheapest pathways. However, the interactions between the different stakeholders are not considered in such approaches. The existence of such interactions may lead to a non-optimal implementation of CO₂ reduction pathways under the applied policy framework. It is important for the enforced policies to guarantee the implementation of the lowest cost pathways to avoid recessive consequences associated with emissions mitigation. This work tries to identify the effect of such interactions on the feasibility of the optimal solution. CO₂ reduction policy can then be assessed based on the resulting feasible solution in comparison with the optimal solution. A conducted case study showed that a high tax on CO₂ emissions may result in deviations from the optimality. Subsidizing CO₂capture and renewable energy would help in reducing the economic impact on the stakeholders, leading to a feasible optimal solution.