"The Role of Carbon Capture and Storage in Decarbonizing U.S. Data Centers" Energy & Fuels
Over the last two decades, annual carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. have declined significantly. In recent years, however, this trend has slightly reversed, likely due to the explosive growth of data centers. As energy-intensive data centers proliferate, their emissions could undo years of decarbonization efforts. According to an analysis of data in the public domain, capturing and storing emissions in underground reservoirs could halt this reversal, researchers report in ACS' Energy & Fuels.
More data centers are needed to keep up with the rapidly growing demand for computational power, particularly to support emerging artificial intelligence models. Study authors Hon Chung Lau and Steve C. Tsai project that the power requirement of data centers in the U.S. will more than quadruple, going from 40 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 to an estimated 169 GW in 2030.
Meeting this demand will require greatly expanding energy production. Fossil fuels - particularly natural gas, which is more abundant and relatively cleaner burning than coal - is the most reliable solution. "Natural gas combined cycle [NGCC] power plants equipped with carbon capture and storage technologies [CCS] will be the best way to provide power to these data centers and prevent carbon dioxide from being emitted to the atmosphere," says Lau.
Previous researchers have suggested that saline aquifers - deep layers of rock with salt water-filled pores - could be used to store carbon dioxide gas captured from fossil fuel-based power plants. Injecting the carbon dioxide into these spaces would trap it there permanently.
The researchers calculated that powering all data centers in the U.S. with fossil fuels would raise yearly carbon dioxide emissions from 90 million tons in 2025 to 404 million tons by 2030. Next, they mapped the data centers and underground saline aquifers to assess how much of these emissions could be stored there.
The mapping found that 34 U.S. states have sufficient saline aquifers to store carbon dioxide for more than a century. If emissions in these states were injected into saline aquifers starting in 2025, nearly three-fourths of data center emissions could be mitigated by 2030. Transporting carbon dioxide captured in other states via pipelines to neighboring states with saline aquifers would raise that figure to 90%. Locating data centers close to both natural gas reservoirs and saline aquifers would minimize the cost of energy supply to data centers and reduce the cost of large-scale decarbonization efforts like CCS.
Although CCS is a mature technology, groundwork is still needed to deploy it at scale. Decarbonizing data centers would require partnerships between data center owners, utilities, and CCS providers, Lau says.
The authors are associated with Low Carbon Energies, LLC, a consulting company involved in the ongoing energy transition.
