Techno-economic assessment of chemical looping reforming of natural gas for hydrogen production and power generation with integrated CO2 capture

Abstract

The current study presents the techno-economic analysis of the CLR-CC process. The CLR-CC process comprises of chemical looping reforming (CLR) of Natural Gas, water gas shift, CO2 capture and compression, and combined cycle power plant. A 1-D phenomenological model was developed using MATLAB and is used to study the performance of CLR, whereas the remaining part of the process was analysed using commercial software tools like Aspen and Thermoflow. The effect of design conditions in CLR, mainly the air flowrate to the oxidation reactor, oxidation reactor outlet temperature and the steam flowrate to the fuel reactor of CLR, on the overall techno-economic performance of the CLR-CC process is reported. The CH4 conversion in CLR, net electrical efficiency, CO2 avoidance rate and the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) have been identified as techno-economic performance indicators. For the sensitivity study carried out in this study through 12 cases, the net electrical efficiency of the CLR-CC process varies between 40.0 and 43.4 %, whereas the LCOE varies between 75.3 and 144.8 $/MWh, which is highly dependent on the fuel cost and process contingency rates.

Techno-economic assessment of an integrated high pressure chemical-looping process with packed-bed reactors in large scale hydrogen and methanol production

“…Both concept have been compared from a techno-economic point of view in Spallina et al, (2017b) showing some improvements in terms of efficiency (8-10% higher) and costs of CO 2 avoidance (CCA) ranging from 20-85 €/ton CO2 . Similar results has been obtained by Nazir et al, (2018) who assessed the cost of pre-combustion configuration using CLR as a syngas generation technology and by Symonds et al, (2019) for the production of heat for the steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) process in oil sand field and syngas for GTL process.…”

Gas switching reforming (GSR) for power generation with CO2 capture: Process efficiency improvement studies

“…The GSR-CC process provides an opportunity for a flexible output, electricity or pure H2. The net electrical efficiency of the GSR-CC process presented by Nazir, Cloete [15] lies between 45-47.5%, which is competitive to that of other combined cycle power cycles with CO2 capture, using steam-methane reforming at 43.6% [16], auto-thermal reforming at 46.9% [17] and chemical looping reforming between 42 -46% [18,19]. The CO2 avoidance in the GSR-CC is more than 95%, and is higher than any of the aforementioned methods.…”

“…The steam levels for LP/MP/HP steam are 3.4/33/166 bar at the inlet of the respective turbines. The GT system chosen is the GE 9371FB model since it is robust to fuel composition changes [15,18,20,21].…”

“…The H2 composition is ~50% (mol basis) after diluting with N2-rich stream, which also reduces the chances of NOx formation [22]. Similar operating design conditions for gas turbine are assumed in other pre-combustion capture process studies using diluted H2 as gas turbine fuel [18,21,23].…”

Techno-Economic Comparison of Combined Cycle Power Plants with Pre-Combustion Co2 Capture Via Two Different Reforming Methods: Chemical Looping Reforming and Gas Switching Reforming

“…For CLR, scientific literature is available on choice of oxygen carrier [6] and reactor-scale studies [7][8][9][10]. A gasfired combined cycle power plant integrated with CLR and CO2 capture, denoted as CLR-CC [11], has been proposed and a detailed techno-economic study has been presented [12]. The proof of concept for the GSR concept was presented by Wassie, Gallucci [13].…”