Publications

The world continues to face the challenge of securing energy supply while ensuring the energy transition advances at pace. No single transition pathway can be reasonably predicted, given the wide range of uncertainties. A key action to reduce emissions across different energy transition scenarios includes deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS), whereby CO2 is captured, conditioned, transported, and stored safely underground. Carbon capture and storage is one of the few proven technologies available to mitigate global GHG emissions. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has stated that CCS alone has the potential to deliver 17% of the world’s required CO2 mitigation by 2050, and as such, CCS must be a part of the strategy. CCS is generally recognized as one of the only technologies that can enable negative emissions including in hard-to-abate industrial sectors. However, many industrial plants operate at much smaller scales (<1 MTA), and as a result have lower overall emissions (mainly in lower concentration) thus it may be uneconomic to consider application of the full CCS chain for each emission source. Moreover, not all countries in Asia Pacific hold the geological formations suitable for CO2 sequestration, necessitating the CO2 to be transported across national borders. One solution to this problem is a CCS hub, in which several industrial facilities share a common CCS infrastructure & storage facility, and thus reduce the costs compared with each facility attempting to individually reduce emissions. Multiple large-scale CCS hubs development will be required to ultimately reach target capacity levels. Such arrangement requires different industries to collaborate and establish new commercial framework to enable the value chain. This paper provides an overview of the potential application of CCS Hub concept mainly in Indonesia & Asia Pacific region and examines the conditions needed for its more widespread adoption.