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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🔬研究者:Provides a methodological framework linking life-cycle assessment and carbon pricing for CCU, with sensitivity analysis that can inform future research.

🏢実務担当者:Offers break-even carbon prices and subsidy thresholds to guide investment decisions in CCU at incineration facilities.

🏛政策担当者:Demonstrates that hydrogen policy, not just carbon pricing, is critical for enabling CCU in waste management, informing policy design.

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.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/su18168283first seen 2026-08-14 05:03:48