SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Significant commercial scale deployment of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies is necessary to achieve the climate change mitigation goal of greatly reducing the global CO2 emissions while allowing for the utilization of fossil fuels as a transitional power source to continue. The U.S.’s recently expanded section 45Q tax credit encourages private companies to invest in carbon capture deployment by incrementally increasing the credit value of geologically stored CO2. Many efforts have been undertaken to provide modeling and financial analysis tools for CCUS applications to help with decision making. While these efforts have produced significant advances in understanding and capabilities, the resulting toolset is disparate and difficult to use, requiring expertise well beyond most individuals involved in CCUS decision making. The result is that CCUS project evaluation is very expensive and limited to a relatively small group of experts in each of the fields driving the overall techno-economic-assessment. REI and the project team will deliver a next-generation, cloud-based decision-making software platform, which integrates the wide variety of tools available into a single, easy-to-use application with a web-based user interface, with capabilities to evaluate and optimize project planning, costs, risks, and uncertainty. A key element of this unified application will be detailed High- Performance-Computing (HPC) modeling of the underground CO2 reservoirs. The software will be sold using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model where users pay for access to the website and corresponding simulation engine. The competitive advantage of our product will be its ease-of- access, ease-of-use, and the enhanced modeling capabilities that will be phased in by the team long-term. The result will be a cloud-deployed modeling tool that will provide a vital link in the chain to make CCUS achievable at large-scale. The proposed software’s powerful simulation capabilities will be made available to CCUS stakeholder customers that do not have dedicated modeling, simulation, and financial experts available. The final product of the proposed work, available following a Phase II effort, will be a turn-key, cloud-based, easy-to-use, computationally efficient decision-making software tool for Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) projects. The availability of this software will help to develop stakeholder confidence in CCUS by evaluating technical details, logistics, and costs. The SaaS CCUS decision-making software is expected to be of interest to the numerous stakeholders involved in CCUS projects, including powerplants, well owners, oil and gas companies, regulatory entities, and capital investors. The proposed software can provide a key driver to the fledgling CCUS market, which is expected to grow worldwide to 5.6 billion US dollars by 2026.
