Planning and scheduling of CO₂ capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) operations as a strip packing problem

CO₂ capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) is an important carbon management strategy that involves capturing CO₂ from flue gas, transporting it, utilizing it for economically productive activities (carbon capture and utilization, or CCU), and/or permanently disposing it in non-atmospheric sinks (carbon capture and storage, or CCS). Some technologies, such as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) allow simultaneous CCUS, while other alternatives are either purely CCS (e.g., geological storage) or purely CCU (e.g., use of CO₂ as a process plant feedstock). In this work, CCUS is addressed in the context of a large-scale CO₂ chain that contains both CCS and CCU options. It is necessary to consider the availability of CO₂ sources and sinks to develop a profitable allocation plan for such CCUS systems. Thus, a modeling framework using a geometric representation is proposed to optimize both scheduling and allocation in a CCUS system, given multiple CO₂ sources and sinks. Two mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models are developed to address three important factors for planning downstream CCUS operations, i.e., scheduling of CO₂ capture and EOR operations, allocation of CO₂ supply for EOR operations, and source–sink matching subject to injectivity and capacity constraints. Two case studies are then solved to illustrate the two MILP models.