ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mater.
Sec. Colloidal Materials and Interfaces
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancements in Sustainable Nanotechnology, Environment, and EnergyView all 4 articles
Marginal abatement cost analysis of cleaner power production alternatives for sustainable energy transition
Provisionally accepted
- Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
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Energy Transition is a global transformation – driven by greenhouse-gas climate changes – in which fossil power production is replaced by fully renewable counterparts. Nowadays, the world has accomplished a small fraction of Energy Transition. The main reason is that fossil energy sources are still abundant, costless, portable, and easily implementable while renewable sources are still technologically incipient, costly, cumbersomely portable, intermittent/seasonal and land-intensive. Since the world cannot suddenly get rid of fossil power production, the compromise is to convert it into Sustainable Fossil Power Production by attaching carbon abatement processes (Anti-Carbon Packages). Moreover, it is also conducive to migrate from carbon-intensive fossil power production to less carbon-intensive ones. This trend is perceptible as coal-fired plants are being replaced by Natural Gas Combined-Cycles characterized by maximum thermodynamic yields and minimum carbon emitted per kWh among all fossil analogues. Thus, a conceivable next step of Energy Transition is to implement Natural Gas Combined-Cycles with Anti-Carbon-Packages. This work compares the three Anti-Carbon Packages – Post-Combustion, Oxy-Combustion and Pre-Combustion – attached to typical Natural Gas Combined-Cycle. A differential is the novel Marginal Abatement Cost (MAC) adopted as economic-environmental performance metric. It is shown that Post-Combustion-Combined-Cycle requires minimum investment (596.89MMUSD) attaining maximum net value (2,060.68MMUSD) and minimum MAC (4.58USD/tCO2), being the best economic-environmental compromise. Oxy-Combustion-Combined-Cycle attains maximum investment (1,095.19MMUSD) and intermediary MAC (12.09USD/tCO2) and net value (1,144.21MMUSD), but offers the best social benefit per environmental harm (PowerExported/CO2Emitted=51.63MWh/tCO2). Pre-Combustion-Combined-Cycle has minimum net value (339.66MMUSD) and maximum MAC (28.17USD/tCO2), and is likely the worst decarbonized combined-cycle according to all metrics.
Keywords: Cleaner energy, Sustainable energy, Power production, Marginal abatement cost, Post-combustion, Oxy-combustion
Received: 05 Aug 2025; Accepted: 29 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Garcia, da Cunha, De Medeiros and Araujo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: José Luiz De Medeiros, jlm@eq.ufrj.br
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