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Break-Even Carbon Pricing for Sustainable Carbon Capture and Utilization at Municipal Solid Waste Incineration Facilities: A Life-Cycle Environmental and Economic Assessment Under 2024 and 2050 Scenarios
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DOI：10.3390/su18168283.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Municipal solid waste (MSW) incineration with energy recovery is embedded in national decarbonization strategies but emits fossil CO2 from plastic-derived combustion, challenging the long-term sustainability of waste-to-energy systems. Carbon capture and utilization (CCU) offers a potential mitigation route, yet assessments rarely link technology economics, environmental performance, and the carbon-pricing instruments that would finance deployment. This study develops a break-even carbon-pricing framework integrating life-cycle CO2 emissions (LCCO2) and discounted annualized life-cycle cost (LCC; capital-recovery-factor annualization at a 4% real discount rate) for two CCU routes—methanation and methanol synthesis—applied to a 300 t/day Japanese incineration facility (84,000 t/y) under 2024 and 2050 energy-system conditions, thereby quantifying the environmental and the economic dimensions of sustainable CCU deployment in the waste sector. Two complementary indicators are distinguished: an incremental break-even carbon price, the price at which adding CCU to the existing waste-to-energy facility becomes economically neutral, and a plant-level cash balance price. Under the product-system boundary and photovoltaic-electrolysis hydrogen, both routes show lower life-cycle emissions than the baseline in both years; the magnitude—and, for methanation in 2024, the sign—of the net climate benefit depends on the downstream-use accounting boundary. The incremental break-even price for methanol falls from 20.3 × 104 JPY/t-CO2 (≈1293 USD/t-CO2) in 2024 to 1.90 × 104 JPY/t-CO2 (≈122 USD/t-CO2) in 2050, while that for methanation falls from 32.2 × 104 JPY/t-CO2 to 0.75 × 104 JPY/t-CO2 (≈48 USD/t-CO2)—about half the 2023 EU ETS average price—and approaches zero at approximately a one-third capital subsidy. This collapse is driven largely by the assumed hydrogen-price decline (100 → 20 JPY/Nm3); hydrogen-supply policy, rather than carbon pricing alone, therefore appears to be the dominant lever for making CCU at MSW incineration a viable contribution to sustainable, carbon-neutral waste management. Sensitivity analyses covering the discount rate (2–8%), plant scale (300–900 t/day), methane leakage, product-market absorption, and hydrogen delivered price premiums support the robustness of this sequencing conclusion.
Keywords:
carbon capture and utilization
waste-to-energy
sustainable waste management
life-cycle assessment
life-cycle cost
break-even carbon price
carbon neutrality
methanation
methanol synthesis
Journal
IF:
3.3
Papers:
10.5W
Citations:
28.4W
Organization
Cited Papers