Optimization of CCUS Source-Sink Matching for Large Coal-Fired Units: A Case of North China

Climate change has become an important part of the human destiny community, China faces dual pressures both at home and abroad for carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reductions, and the clean coal utilization and low-carbon development in China will be the key development direction in the future. This study takes the city or country with a coal-fired unit above 300 MW in North China as a CO2 source and the basin in North China and its surrounding area as a CO2 sink, and estimates distances between sources and sinks by ArcGIS. Through modelling and optimizing the cost of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) source-sink matching for North China in the next 30 years, it results that the best solution for source-sink matching is obtained, the total CO2 capture volume from coal-fired power plants reaches approximate 22.8 billion tons, the total CCUS cost is about $1.78 trillion, the unit cost is about $78/ton CO2, and the CO2 transport pipeline network is about 52,876 km, which provides a data support and methodological reference for further research on China's CCUS source-sink matching.