Integrated Waste Carbon Dioxide Recovery and Transcritical Energy Storage Using Liquefied Natural Gas Cold Energy

ABSTRACT Liquefied natural gas (LNG) regasification releases high‐grade cold exergy that can reduce the refrigeration demand of CO 2 liquefaction, while industrial waste heat can support transcritical CO 2 energy storage. However, the effects of heat‐recuperation architecture and time‐of‐use dispatch on thermodynamic performance, CO 2 recovery, and profitability remain insufficiently understood. This study develops a recuperative integrated carbon capture and energy storage system (RICCES) and a non‐recuperative counterpart (NICCES). Each configuration is evaluated under two idealized dispatch scenarios constructed from independent steady‐state operating points: single‐peak discharge (Mode 1) and flat‐peak combined discharge (Mode 2). A cold‐exergy allocation coefficient and a cold‐exergy‐normalized CO 2 liquefaction mass ratio are introduced to distinguish cold‐resource allocation from liquefaction productivity. At the baseline design point, RICCES–Mode 2 achieves a system‐level thermal efficiency of 63.47% and an exergy efficiency of 76.59%. Parametric analysis increases the system‐level thermal efficiency to a maximum of 65.85% at 400°C and 17 MPa. The maximum exergy efficiency reaches 78.45% at 400°C and 12 MPa. Recuperation reduces system irreversibility, whereas NICCES produces approximately 38% more liquid CO 2 and reaches a peak cold‐exergy‐normalized liquefaction mass ratio of 2.022, compared with 1.469 for RICCES. NICCES–Mode 1 provides the strongest overall economic performance, with a levelized cost of electricity of 0.111 USD/kWh, a CO 2 avoided cost of 15.29 USD/t, a payback period of 4.80 years, an annual total profit of 51.50 million USD, and a net present value of 828.98 million USD. NICCES–Mode 1 remains the most profitable configuration in all nine market scenarios, and its net present value remains positive at 623.25–1034.71 million USD under ±30% parameter variations. These results reveal a clear design trade‐off between thermodynamic efficiency and commercial performance under the idealized steady‐state dispatch scenarios considered. The reported results apply to an idealized or pretreated CO 2 ‐rich wet stream containing only CO 2 and H 2 O, rather than untreated industrial flue gas.