Carbon Capture Calculator

This calculator estimates the cost and net climate benefit of a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, and its key insight is that captured CO₂ and avoided CO₂ are not the same number. Multiplying your facility's annual emissions by the capture efficiency gives tons captured, but every capture technology also consumes energy — post-combustion amine scrubbing (base cost $60/ton) costs a 25% output penalty, pre-combustion IGCC ($45/ton) costs 18%, oxy-fuel ($52/ton) costs 22%, and direct air capture ($400/ton, far pricier because it pulls CO₂ from dilute ambient air rather than concentrated flue gas) costs 30%. That energy penalty, assumed to come from the same fossil source, is subtracted back out to get "net CO₂ avoided" — the number that actually reflects climate benefit — and the calculator reports cost per ton on that net basis, which is always higher than the sticker price per ton captured.

The per-ton capture cost itself isn't fixed either: pushing efficiency above 90% gets progressively more expensive (a 3% cost increase per point above 90), while dropping below 70% also raises costs per ton, reflecting real diminishing returns at both extremes. Transport adds $3 per 100 km of pipeline, and storage plus monitoring/verification/accounting add a flat $15/ton for saline aquifer injection. Finally, the model applies the US federal 45Q tax credit ($85/ton for geologic storage — the rate under 26 U.S.C. § 45Q for projects meeting the statute's prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements, five times the $17/ton base rate) against the gross captured tons — not the net avoided tons — which can make the credit look larger relative to actual climate benefit than it truly is, especially for lower-efficiency, higher-energy-penalty methods.