Trading of carbon credits will become prevalent in response to global decarbonization efforts. There will be companies specializing in the sale of credits generated internally (e.g., using negative emissions technologies) or purchased from external sources (e.g., generated from energy conservation projects). Process Integration methodology can be adapted to provide vital decision support for such activities. In this work, an extension of Pinch Analysis (PA) is developed for planning the sale of carbon credits under temporal constraints. Projects and facilities that generate carbon credits are treated as sources, while buyers of the credits are treated as demands. It is assumed that carbon credits need to be generated before they are sold, and time is used in a manner analogous to temperature in conventional PA to impose directionality constraints when transferring credits from sources to sinks. The flow of carbon credits from each source and into each demand is assumed to occur at a fixed rate between the well-defined start and end times. Targeting viable sales is done using the standard graphical Composite Curve approach. The methodology is demonstrated with a series of illustrative case studies.
