Performance and Cost Analysis of Natural Gas Combined Cycle Plants with Chemical Looping Combustion

Abstract

The natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) is the most popular and efficient fossil fuel power plant; however, integrating a carbon capture system reduces its performance efficiency. The demand to reduce the carbon capture cost and improve eco-friendliness drives the development of alternatives. In this study, four alternative NGCC-based process schemes were designed: NGCC with amine carbon capture as a base configuration and NGCCs with three different chemical looping combustion (CLC) configurations. Detailed heat and material balances were evaluated for all four cases using the PRO/II simulation package. A comparative analysis of the gross and net power, plant efficiency, and carbon capture efficiency, which are imperative to optimizing the process configuration, was conducted for all of the proposed cases. All NGCC-CLC processes could produce higher net power than NGCC-MEA because the amine regenerator consumes a high amount of power in its operation. In the condition using an equal amount of natural gas supply, NGCC-CLC configurations using excess air could produce a net power of 510.1 MW with a plant efficiency of 44.35%. The excess air fed in both cases enabled the turbine to generate more power. NGCC-CLC using excess air with steam turbine integration has an investment cost of 132.9 $/net MWh, an operating cost of 56.7 $/net MWh year, and a levelized cost of electricity of 90.9 $/MWh. In addition, NGCC-CLC with excess air resulted in a carbon capture efficiency of 99.93% under 59.2 $/ton of CO 2 , which was higher than that of NGCC-MEA with a carbon efficiency of 95.1%. NGCC-CLC using excess air with steam turbine integration is considered as the most efficient process scheme for generating power from natural gas with regard to efficiency, cost, and environmental impact.

Techno-Economic Assessment of Natural Gas Combined Cycle Power Plants with Carbon Capture and Utilization

“…A substantial amount of CO 2 generated via combustion increases the capacity of CCP and its operational cost. Furthermore, the large quantity of captured CO 2 is attributed to challenges with CO 2 T&S. 4 As the primary goal in case 1 was to generate electricity, no additional conversion/separation was needed. The techno-economic assessment of the NGCC power plant with CO 2 conversion and syngas separation (dry reformer and/or membrane processes in this study) for cases (2 and 3) producing both electricity and syngas was compared with the reference case (case 1).…”

“…The method was validated in the previous work. 4 The CO 2 saline storage cost model 56 was used to assess the costs of CO 2 capture, transport, storage, and monitoring in the comparative analysis of economic performance based on CCU. The cost of fuel (NG) and products (electricity and syngas) is one of the most important aspects of economic analysis.…”

“…2 However, since NGCC power plants release around 355 kg/MWh electricity CO 2 into the atmosphere, 2−4 carbon neutralization requires the capture, storage, and/or utilization of CO 2 from the flue gas liberated by NGCC power plants. 3,4 Carbon capture and utilization (CCU) is a promising alternative to carbon capture and storage (CCS) 5 as it can overcome high transportation and storage costs, reduce potential risk, and decrease the regional distribution of storage sites. CO 2 can be converted into syngas, methanol, dimethyl ether, acrylic acid, formic acid, methane, ethane, ethylene, ethanol, and propanol 6,7 via various catalytic reaction pathways.…”

“…However, many previous studies concentrated on the efficiency of NGCC power plants based on the CO 2 capture technique 32 and its technoeconomic feasibility. 3,4,33,34 The techno-economic study of soda ash production-based flue gas from NGCC power plants was performed as a part of CO 2 utilization. 5 It is urgent to develop and evaluate advanced NGCC power plant configurations integrated with CCU, aiming to cope with CO 2 emission from the rapid global deployment of NGCC power plants.…”

Pressurised Chemical Looping Combustion (PCLC): Air Reactor design

“…This is the same to say that we would have a specific work produced by the turbine of about 320 kJ per kilogram of hot air evolving, which is reasonable if we think that for an ideal cycle we have a specific work in the gas turbine which is about 400 kJ/kg. Now we have to consider that the excess air which expands in the gas turbine has to be high, see for example [27] and [28], in which it is suggested an excess air ratio which is up to 3.7 in order to control the temperature e.g. to avoid too high temperature at turbine inlet and oxygen carriers particles sintering.…”