Overcoming the barriers towards the design and deployment of economically feasible, environmentally desirable and socially acceptable carbon dioxide capture, transport, utilization and storage (CCUS) value chains.

To address climate change and environmental degradation, the EU has set objectives with net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 to become the first climate-neutral continent. Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) is expected to be one of the key technological solutions as it allows to address inevitable GHG emissions. To establish CCUS value chains and stimulate investments to ensure adequate scale and availability of the technology, it is crucial to understand, develop and implement measures to prioritize the development of the technologies with the highest potential potential (as well economically). Current state-of-the-art techno-economic and environmental impact assessments of CCUS are limited due to following reasons: (i) heterogeneity in potential CCUS value chains, point sources, capture methods, transport, storage, and utilization, (ii) their dependence on specific information related to background systems of specific technologies, specific geographic conditions and time period, (iii) the current lack of accepted benchmarks, best practices and integrated sustainability assessments for CCUS and (iv) the social dimension that is not addressed in current assessments. This makes current state-of-the-art methods data-intensive and the obtained results very specific. Thus, there is a need for a standardized, harmonized, generic methodological framework to stimulate the design and deployment of economically feasible, environmentally desirable and socially acceptable CCUS value chains. This requires a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach involving expertise from different fields: chemical engineering, economics, sociology, quantitative sustainability assessments, process systems engineering and stakeholders along the value chain. The proposed postdoc challenge is as follows: "How can we create understanding about the levers that are needed to design and deploy economically feasible, environmentally desirable and socially acceptable carbon dioxide capture, transport, utilization and storage (CCUS) value chains ?" The following aspects are expected to be addressed : - Advances beyond the current state-of-the-art research on the sustainability impacts of CCUS. - Provide a harmonized, holistic, integrated prospective/ex-ante sustainability assessment framework on the full CCUS system and CCUS value chains, facilitating development of the most technologically, economically feasible, environmentally desirable and socially acceptable CCUS technologies and value chains. - Involvement of different stakeholders in the CCUS value chains - Reproducibility and honest benchmarking of CCUS technologies - Sound assessments to guide R&D in the most optimal direction and pinpoint those areas of technologies and systems that have the highest potential and where improvement is required.

Keywords:TECHNO-ECONOMIC ANALYSIS, SOCIAL ASPECTS, ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT, CARBON MITIGATION

Disciplines:Modelling, simulation and optimisation, Chemical process design, Agricultural and natural resource economics, environmental and ecological economics