Techno-Economic Analysis of Mobile Carbon Capture for Heavy Duty Applications

Since signing the legally binding Paris agreement, fighting climate change has been an increasingly important task worldwide. One of the key energy sectors to emit greenhouse gases is transportation. Therefore, long term strategies all over the world have been set up to reduce on-road combustion emissions. One of the emerging alternative technologies to decarbonize the transportation sector is Mobile Carbon Capture (MCC). MCC refers to the on-board separation of CO₂ from vehicle exhaust. To accurately assess this technology, a techno-economic analysis is essential to compare MCC abatement cost to alternative decarbonization technologies such as electric trucks. Adding to the system capital and operational costs, our study includes mass penalty costs, CO₂ offloading and transport costs for different transport scenarios. To better relate to a single consumer (driver), the cost can be converted from euro per-tCO₂ to euro per-trip or euro per-mile. A sensitivity analysis is then conducted to quantify the impacts of the most sensitive parameters on the overall abatement costs. This study shows that MCC should be explored as a viable climate mitigation option. The novelty of this work comes from the detailed cost categories taken into consideration in the analysis, for a better MCC technology feasibility and impact analysis study. The results show that MCC represents an economically promising solution to decarbonize the heavy-duty sector, through its decreased TCO and MAC values compared to BEVs and FCEVs.