Getting started

Introduction

What CO2GIS is, the problem it solves, and who it's for.

CO2GIS (the LeastCostPipeline QGIS plugin) plans CO₂ transport pipelines for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). It combines raster-based least-cost path routing with cell-level CAPEX estimation in a single interactive QGIS workflow — no programming required.

It implements three things in one place:

• the COMET multi-criteria cost model — from the EU COMET research project and its model paper (van den Broek et al., 2013) — which turns territorial data into a per-cell crossing cost;
• least-cost path routing via GRASS GIS, which finds the globally optimal corridor;
• CAPEX estimation with a pipeline diameter derived from the Darcy–Weisbach equation.

The problem

Choosing where a CO₂ pipeline should go is a multi-criteria spatial problem. The best corridor depends on land use, terrain slope, infrastructure crossings and existing corridors, while the total cost depends on length, diameter and pressure. These factors interact across a whole country, so doing it by hand is impractical.

Existing tools treat the two halves separately: general-purpose GIS offers routing but no CO₂-specific cost model, and network optimisers work on graphs rather than continuous raster surfaces and don’t price the route cell by cell. To our knowledge, no other tool combined a COMET raster cost surface, raster least-cost routing and engineering-grade CAPEX in one accessible GIS workflow. That is the gap CO2GIS fills.

Who it’s for

GIS analysts, energy and CCS engineers, researchers, and planners who need a defensible first-pass route and cost for a CO₂ pipeline — without writing code.

Requirements

QGIS 3.0 or newer, with the bundled GRASS provider and Processing framework enabled (included in the standard QGIS installers). No extra Python packages are needed.

Next: see the workflow at a glance, then the COMET cost model.