A computer-aided unified approach for CO2 mitigation with case studies

Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, mainly CO ₂, are likely to accelerate the rate of climate change. An optimization approach for CO ₂ reduction is developed in a general form that can be applied on different industries. The mathematical model is tested on two case studies. In the power generation case study, for 1% CO ₂ reduction target, only fuel balancing need to be applied and even a decrease of ∼ 1.3% in overall cost is obtained. The optimal generation is to increase production from all non fossil fuel power plants and decrease production from natural gas power plant. For higher reduction targets, it is necessary to implement fuel switching. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 8th World Congress of Chemical Engineering (Montreal, Quebec, Canada 8/23-27/2009).