SimCCS: An Open-source Tool for Optimizing Energy Infrastructure Developed

SimCCS is Los Alamos National Laboratory’s lead story for the current Science Highlights issue; see http://www.lanl.gov/science-innovation/science-highlights/ for more details.
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture and storage (CCS) is a key technology in all climate change mitigation plans that limit global temperatures below 2 °C of warming. To have a meaningful impact, CCS infrastructure would be deployed on a large scale, requiring massive economic investment. At the regional scale, this would involve capturing CO₂from dozens of industrial sources (such as power plants), constructing thousands of kilometers of dedicated CO₂ pipelines, and injecting and storing CO₂ in geologic reservoirs (such as deep saline aquifers and depleted oil fields). Deploying infrastructure on this scale requires careful and comprehensive planning.
Los Alamos researchers have developed an infrastructure optimization tool that allows the CCS research and commercial communities to design efficient CCS infrastructure networks. SimCCS (https://github.com/simCCS/SimCCS) integrates capture, storage, and network engineering with economic analysis to drive CCS infrastructure deployment decisions. The open-source nature of SimCCS enables collaborative, community-driven capability development on a common extensible platform.