Regents of the University of Michigan

Published purpose

The Project intends to develop a tool able to generate Techno-Economic and Life Cycle assessments (TEA/LCA) of various CO2 conversion technologies using updated guidelines. These assessments will be done using static and dynamic simulations and will be based on the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of the concerned technology. The combination of dynamic simulation and TRL consideration in a TEA/LCA tool is a new development. The outcome of the simulations will quantify both the economic and environmental impact of a technology under review. The tool will initially be applied to assess a technology being developed at the NRC, which is currently at laboratory scale and able to convert CO2 into methane using a microbial electrosynthesis process. The TEA/LCA results generated by the tool will help identify technology development gaps in the NRC technology. These will be addressed to allow the NRC to further develop and later promote this new pathway for CO2 conversion. Additionally, the tool will be applied to multiple other CO2 conversion technologies in order to benchmark the NRC’s technology against these technologies. Ultimately, the Project will result in a new TEA/LCA tool that will generate a library of economic and environmental impacts for a variety of CO2 conversion technologies.