Adding a CO2 producing technology

[evrenmturan]

Hi!
I'm doing a study where the energy system of a country has the option to compensate for unmodelled CO2 emissions. To do so I coded a dummy/virtual technology CO2_EMISSIONS_OTHERS that emits a certain amount of CO2 over the year. I'd prefer to use a dummy technology over a negative GHG constraint as (i) the amount of "extra CO2" emissions captured should be a decision variable of the problem and (ii) I would also like to see directly see the impact of not compensating for the emissions.

Do you have any advice on how I would add this technology with mescal? I tried adding CO2_EMISSIONS_OTHERS to the CPC mapping and the model file, respectively, but couldn’t get it to work as intended.

Any help would really be appreciated!

Best,
Evren

[matthieu-str]

Hello @evrenmturan,

I can see two options for this:

1. Use the limit_territorial parameter to constraint the amount of GHG emissions of the system. The latter can be subject to a sensitivity analysis, where you highlight a few points that correspond to typical cases, for instance: net-zero economy, net-zero energy system, BaU. The impacts of emissions due to the rest of the economy could be added to the total as a post-processing step (e.g., you can multiply GHG emissions by their respective characterization factors to go at the endpoint level).
2. Implement the virtual technology representing emissions from the rest of the economy. To do so, you can create a new LCI dataset that emits 1 kg of CO2 (and with a fictive reference product). You should add it to the relevant input files of mescal, i.e., mapping and unit_conversion. There is nothing to do with other files like model or mapping_esm_flows_to_cpc as this virtual technology is therefore not subject to double-counting removal. As an alternative, you can also consider to compute the impact factors by hand (using characterization factors for instance), as none of the processes of mescal actually apply to such a virtual technology. Just be careful with the normalization step to make sure you have coherent units.

Out of curiosity, you mentioned the virtual technology as a decision variable. May I ask what trade-off you are modelling, i.e., why would the system compensate for those emissions, is there something like a carbon tax mechanism for example?

Hope it helps,

Matthieu

[evrenmturan]

Thanks (2) worked!
For now, it's just a placeholder to test an idea, but yes, we can look at what incentives/synergies are required for the system to compensate for emissions.