TEACOS (Techno-Economic Analysis Of Complex Option Spaces)

TEACOS is a mathematical optimization tool for mid- to long-term strategic investment analysis. The tool is designed to assist in the investment decision making process. It aims to answer the following questions:

  • In which (decarbonization) opportunities to invest?

  • What is the optimal investment timing?

  • How much to invest?

By answering these questions, TEACOS provides credible, affordable and competitive transition pathways towards a low carbon energy system. TEACOS is completely data driven. Because of this, it can be applied in any industrial sector and on any scale.

TEACOS models the supply chain as a network. In the network, nodes represent locations or (production) units, and the connections between the nodes (arcs) represent transport of commodities between the nodes. Additionally, possible adaptations to the network infrastructure can be modelled as investments. The model selects the best combination of investments and calculates the corresponding product flow such that either the Net Present Value is as high as possible, or the costs are minimized.

One of the major strengths of TEACOS lies in answering ‘what-if’ questions: i.e. ‘what if CO2 emission costs rise?’, by defining several scenarios in which certain assumptions are altered: i.e. a scenario with fixed CO2 emission costs and one where CO2 emission costs change over time.

TEACOS needs input on five different aspects:

  1. Supply: resource availability and cost, utility availability and cost.

  2. Conversion Infrastructure: yields and capacities, CAPEX and OPEX.

  3. Transport Infrastructure: capacities, CAPEX and OPEX.

  4. Demand: product/service demand and sales prices.

  5. Strategic input: investment opportunities and their impact, outlook on prices and costs, environmental constraints, learning curves, supply and demand scenarios, other constraints, other scenarios.

The input is currently read from an Excel file.

For more information, see the TEACOS website