Techno-economic evaluation of Carbfix technology for carbon storage in the US

Carbfix is a technology to permanently store captured CO₂ and other sour gases from emission sources as rocks in the subsurface. CO₂ charged water is injected into the basalts to promote the carbonization of CO₂. The dissolution of CO₂ into the aqueous phase facilitates the mineralization of CO₂. It has been demonstrated that over 95% of CO₂ captured and injected was turned into a rock in the subsurface in less than two years. In the original project, this technology aims to store CO₂ from geothermal power plants in Iceland. However, it can be applied to the CO₂ capture from a combined-cycle natural gas power plant as well. This study would like to apply this technology to store the CO₂ from a combined-cycle natural gas power plant to achieve the near-zero emission target. Therefore, the CO₂ storage process has to be modeled and optimized based on this technology. In this process, the water consumption is determined by the depth of the injection well, the temperature, and the water's salinity. The capital costs (injection wells, monitoring wells, injection surface facilities) and operating costs (maintenance, electricity, water cost) interact with each other. In this study, a detailed techno-economic evaluation of Carbfix technology is performed in the context of a 500 MW combined cycle power plant in the US. The sensitivity analysis is carried out with respect to water price, electricity price, equipment cost, etc. The key factors are identified based on the tornado diagram. This methodology can be integrated with the power plant and CO₂ capture model to optimize the whole system simultaneously in future work.