Carbon Sources Diagram - A Tool for Carbon-Constrained Energy Sector Planning

Abstract

Climate change is increasing as an effect of human activities around the world. The reduction of CO2 emissions by human activities would be the most important measure to reduce this negative effect. Recently, many countries around the world have committed to reduce his CO2 emissions over time. In this context, the world has been struggling to balance the growth in energy requirement and environment conservation for a sustainable future, mainly due the adverse environmental, social and economic impacts of global warming that are associated with greenhouse gas emissions. In the last decade, some methodologies based on Pinch Analysis (Linnhoff et al., 1982) were developed as a tool for carbon emission reductions and planning. Thus, the concepts of Pinch Analysis were applied to solve carbon transfer, maximum carbon recovery, minimum carbon targets and the design of carbon exchange networks. Focusing in planning for the power generation sector, a new methodology is presented based in the Water Sources Diagram - WSD (Gomes et al., 2013). This new methodology is called Carbon Sources Diagram - CSD. In this work, the Carbon Sources Diagram is used to locate the rigorous targets for both low and zero-carbon energy sources for carbon-constrained energy planning. The results using the CSD are similar to the ones obtained in the literature with other procedures for the same problems. However, the Carbon Sources Diagram method is easier to be applied and presents a smaller number of steps when compared with the methodologies employed in these works, graphical and algebraic, respectively.