A novel calcium looping–integrated NGCC power plant configuration for carbon capture and utilization—Comprehensive performance analysis

Abstract

Energy plays a pivotal role in industrial development of any country. At present, most of the countries are utilizing fossil fuels, mainly coal and natural gas as energy sources for power production. However, these sources emit high amounts of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) into the atmosphere resulting in global warming. Hence, the fossil fuel-based thermal power plants need to be integrated with CO 2 sequestration and utilization processes for sustainable power production. In this work, four natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plant configurations are proposed-two with CO 2 capture and sequestration (single and double calcium looping units) and two with CO 2 capture and utilization (for production of dimethyl ether). Energy, exergy, environmental, and economic analyses are carried out to assess the performance of the proposed novel configurations against the conventional NGCC power plant. These analyses reveal that the NGCC power plant integrated with double calcium looping unit captures 91.32% of CO 2 with an energy penalty of 6.73%. The proposed CO 2 capture and utilization integrated configurations have low electrical power output; however, the conversion of CO 2 to high energy density dimethyl ether (DME) product resulted in overall energy and exergy efficiency gain. The CO 2 capture and utilization configuration integrated with solar energy is able to convert the total captured CO 2 to DME and makes the process sustainable. K E Y W O R D Scalcium looping unit for CO 2 capture, DME production from CO 2 , economic analysis, energy and exergy analysis, NGCC power generation

Generalized penalties and standard efficiencies of carbon capture and storage processes

“…This paragraph deals with the exergy analysis of separation processes ("stand alone") as it is appearing in an increasing number of works [18][19][20][24][25][26][27] mostly for the postcombustion scheme.…”

“…Some alternative innovations under development are ion transport membranes (ITMs) and oxyfuel combustion with internally generated oxygen and chemical looping combustion. [23][24][25] Current values of energy consumption are around 130 kWh/t O2 for ASU that consists of the cryogenic distillation of gases with different volatilities. 38,[42][43][44] From the point of view of the "exergy analysis," we will focus on the simulation of the air separation unit, as represented in the simplified scheme of Figure 13 described by several papers.…”

“…19 Globally, most of the studies deal with the postcombustion absorption of CO 2 (mainly MEA scrubbing) [18][19][20][21] some works include the exergy analysis of precombustion and oxyfuel combustion processes, implementing conventional and innovative separation processes. [24][25][26][27] Despite the great potential of these methodologies, there are still some limitations in the state of the art. The conventional analysis does not comprehend the origin of the energy streams since are dedicated to "stand-alone" processes and the use of specific simulation software without a shared theoretical framework leads to errors and incongruences in some unit operations.…”

Effect of uncertainty in sorbent characteristic on techno‐economic feasibility of carbonate looping for decarbonisation of coal‐fired power plant

“…Such a layout resulted in a net efficiency penalty of 0.1% points (without CO2 compression) and 4% points (with CO2 compression). Moreover, Pillai et al [16] demonstrated that the CaL retrofit to a natural gas combined cycle plant and dimethyl ether production would result in an efficiency penalty of 8.2% points and a CO2 avoided cost of 15 €/tCO2. As a result of superior thermodynamic performance, a CO2 avoided cost for the CaL retrofits was demonstrated to fall between 10-30 €/tCO2 [14].…”

“…hydrogen production [11], and synthesis of chemicals, such as dimethyl ether [16] and synthetic natural gas [20].…”