Cost benefits of designing carbon capture processes for part-load operation of power plants
Abstract
As fossil power plants increasingly cycle to balance variable renewable generation, carbon capture plants must be designed for a wide range of part-load operating conditions, to avoid excessive capital costs. However, accounting for the variability in design optimization yields higher computational complexity, and is therefore not a current design methodology. Here, we apply two-stage stochastic optimization to identify optimal carbon capture plant designs accounting for part-load flue gas conditions. We reduce computational complexity through a data-driven approach-to-equilibrium model of the absorption and desorption processes. Operating scenarios are derived from real-world part-load operation data of coal and natural gas combined cycle power plants. Our results demonstrate that designs optimized over multiple operating scenarios substantially reduce equipment sizes, lowering capital costs by 5-9 % at the expense of higher operating costs, resulting in a moderate reduction in total annualized cost by 0.5-1.6 %. The lowest costs are achieved when targeting an average capture target across operating scenarios, which allows CO2 capture to be shifted from full-load to part-load periods to reduce peak equipment sizes without compromising overall CO2 emission reductions. These cost benefits are robust across sensitivity analyses and increase with higher shares of part-load operation. Thus, part-load variability should be considered at the design stage, particularly for plants subject to variable load.
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BibTeX
@misc{shu2026cost,
title = {{Cost benefits of designing carbon capture processes for part-load operation of power plants}},
author = {David Yang Shu and Boxun Huang and Yurim Kim and Rahul Gandhi and Randall Field and Sungho Shin},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.36232},
eprint = {2610.36232},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36232},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Cost benefits of designing carbon capture processes for part-load operation of power plants
AU - David Yang Shu
AU - Boxun Huang
AU - Yurim Kim
AU - Rahul Gandhi
AU - Randall Field
AU - Sungho Shin
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.36232
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36232
AB - As fossil power plants increasingly cycle to balance variable renewable generation, carbon capture plants must be designed for a wide range of part-load operating conditions, to avoid excessive capital costs. However, accounting for the variability in design optimization yields higher computational complexity, and is therefore not a current design methodology. Here, we apply two-stage stochastic optimization to identify optimal carbon capture plant designs accounting for part-load flue gas conditions. We reduce computational complexity through a data-driven approach-to-equilibrium model of the absorption and desorption processes. Operating scenarios are derived from real-world part-load operation data of coal and natural gas combined cycle power plants. Our results demonstrate that designs optimized over multiple operating scenarios substantially reduce equipment sizes, lowering capital costs by 5-9 % at the expense of higher operating costs, resulting in a moderate reduction in total annualized cost by 0.5-1.6 %. The lowest costs are achieved when targeting an average capture target across operating scenarios, which allows CO2 capture to be shifted from full-load to part-load periods to reduce peak equipment sizes without compromising overall CO2 emission reductions. These cost benefits are robust across sensitivity analyses and increase with higher shares of part-load operation. Thus, part-load variability should be considered at the design stage, particularly for plants subject to variable load.
ER -