Thermodynamic and economic analysis of a new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant integrated with CaO-based carbon capture system

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijggc.2021.103386Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant integrated with carbon capture system is proposed during the study.

  • Compared with the 600 MWe oxy-enriched coal-fired power plant, the system efficiency of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant is higher around 3.9 %.

  • The CO2 capture cost and levelized cost of electricity of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant are $20.24/tCO2 and $0.056/kWh respectively.

  • The coal and electricity prices have obvious influence on the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant.

Abstract

CaO-based carbon capture system is considered to be the promising carbon capture technology. A new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant integrated with carbon capture system was proposed in this work. The technical and economic evaluation of the new power plant had been completed. In addition, the influence of different parameters (Ca/C ratio, carbon capture efficiency, coal and electricity prices) on the performance of the new 600 MWe power plant was studied. The results indicate that the system efficiency of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant is decreased by 8.3 % as comparing to a benchmark power plant (steam parameter:566 ℃ / 24.2 MPa). However, the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant has obvious advantage compared with the 600 MWe oxy-enriched coal-fired power plant. The economic parameters of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant have some changes compared to the benchmark power plant, including internal rate of return (IRR), total return on investment (ROI), and carbon capture cost of the integrated system is $20.24/tCO2. In addition, the effect of price factors on economic performance of the new 600 MWe power plant was analyzed. The results show that the IRR and ROI increase about 6.61 % and 5.6 % with electricity price increases from $0.054/kWh to $0.072/kWh. And the IRR and ROI decrease about 7.48 % and 6.66 % respectively when coal price increases from $50/t to $94.3/t. The research results indicate that the new power plant has a good application prospect.

Introduction

Nowadays, “global warming” has become a hot topic as CO2 excessive emission is one of the important causes of environmental pollution. Statistical data have showed that CO2 emissions gradually increased since 1985. Especially, the global carbon emissions had been increased by around 45 % with surprising since 2000 (Zhu and Jiang, 2018; Fraccascia and Giannoccaro, 2019). How to reduce CO2 emissions is a difficult issue for researchers all over the world. Plentiful innovative technological concepts have been put forward under such circumstances. CCS (carbon capture and storage) technology is considered as a promising carbon emission reduction technology (Guo and Huang, 2020; Zhao and Liu, 2019; Budinis et al., 2018). It is obvious to say the role of CCS technology is to capture CO2. According to the current research, CO2 capture technologies are mainly divided into pre-combustion, oxy-enriched combustion and post-combustion capture, among which post-combustion carbon capture conception has been demonstrated to be the most effective and widely implemented technology (Romeo et al., 2008; Thitakamol et al., 2007; Chao et al., 2020).

As one of the post-combustion carbon capture technology, CaO-based carbon capture technology has outstanding CO2 capture capacity. The whole process formed occlusive loop of calcium element (Jamrunroj et al., 2019), including carbonation of CaO particles and calcination of CaCO3 particles. It should be pointed out that the adsorption capacity of CaO-based adsorbents was greatly weakened after multiple cycles. Researchers enhanced the anti-sintering ability of CaO-based adsorbents by changing the prepared method or adding other elements, but the high-cost adsorbents were not conducive to large-scale application (Angeli et al., 2014; González et al., 2016; Guo et al., 2017).

Many fields of this technology have been further studied over the years, including improvement of adsorbents, kinetic adsorption model of CaO particles, technical simulation and economic evaluation of CaO-based carbon capture system, etc (Abanades et al., 2004; Desideri and Antonelli, 2014; Nouri et al., 2018; Jamrunroj et al., 2019; Ding et al., 2018; Slater et al., 2019; Abreu et al., 2020; Shaikh et al., 2020). Hanak et al. (2015) detailed the research history of calcium-based carbon capture technology based on the laboratory and industrial scale. It could be concluded that the research on calcium-based carbon capture technology was relatively mature. In addition, some progress has also been made in the coupling of calcium-based carbon capture system with other energy systems. Vivanpatarakij et al. (2009) implemented the fuel cells coupled carbon capture system and illustrated that increasing CO2 capture efficiency could improve the power generation performance of fuel cell. Ortiz et al. (2016) put forward an innovative coal-fired power plant integrated with carbon capture system. Sun et al. (2016) constructed a polygeneration system coupling carbon capture unit and found the efficiency of the integrated system reached 81.62 %. Desideri and Antonelli (2014) fulfilled technical and economic analysis of the coupled carbon capture system. Rolfe et al. (2018) employed ECLIPSE to analyze and evaluate the coupling carbon capture system and pulverized coal power plant. Budinis et al. (2018) evaluated CCS technology systematically and indicated that CCS was a considerable effective carbon emission reduction technology compared with other technologies. On the whole, it could be comprehended that the research of CaO-based carbon capture technology is still in great demand. The work on the coal-fired power plant integrated with carbon capture system is not sufficient. Under the background of carbon neutrality, it is necessary to further optimize the integrated system.

This work had mainly accomplished the following objectives: 1) to propose and simulate a new 600 MWe power plant integrated with CaO-based capture system, analyze the effect of varied parameters on the integrated system performance. 2) to complete economic evaluation of the new 600 MWe power plant and the effect of price factors on the integrated system performance.

Section snippets

Double fluidized bed cao-based carbon capture system

CaO-based carbon capture system was first proposed by professor Shimizu in 1999 (Shimizu et al., 1999), aiming at the reduction of CO2 emissions, which was based on the reversible chemical reaction CaO + CO2 ⇄ CaCO3 (Duan et al., 2016). Fig. 1 shows the process of CaO-based carbon capture system. CaO-based carbon capture technology employed dual fluidized bed as carbonator and calciner reactors respectively. The flue gas entered the carbonator (about 645 ℃) and reacted with the CaO-based

Simulation of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant

ASPEN PLUS had been widely implemented in the field of chemical process (Li et al., 2017; Adeyemi and Janajreh, 2015; Vaquerizo and Cocero, 2018; Sadhwani et al., 2017), which was used to establish the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant integrated with CaO-based carbon capture system. First of all, the 600 MWe supercritical benchmark power plant was simulated in the work. The proximate and ultimate analysis of coal used were shown in Table 1. It is found that coal consumption is 216.21 t/h, and

Evaluation methodology

For optimization and techno-economic evaluation of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant system, some basic conditions must be clarified. The study was mainly divided into two steps: 1) to complete technical and economic simulation of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant 2) to analyze and optimize some parameters on the performance of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant.

Results of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant

Simulation results of the new 600 MWe coal-fired power plant were obtained by ASPEN PLUS shown in Table 5. Compared with the 600 MWe benchmark power plant, the system efficiency of the new 600 MWe power plant is dropped by around 8.3%, which is mainly caused by oxygen production and CO2 compression. In addition, carbon capture efficiency of the new coal-fired power plant is 90%, and CO2 capture energy consumption is 1.4 GJ/t. It is obvious that the system efficiency of the new 600 MWe

Conclusions

An innovative model of the 600 MWe coal-fired power plant integrated with CaO-based carbon capture system was proposed independently in this study. The system simulation and techno-economic evaluation of the new power plant were studied in detail. The simulation results show that compared with the benchmark power plant, the system efficiency of the new coal-fired power plant is decreased by 8.3 %, and CO2 capture energy consumption is 1.4 GJ/t. Compared with the 600 MWe oxy-enriched coal-fired

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Zhixin Li: Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft. Qinhui Wang: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition. Mengxiang Fang: Supervision, Funding acquisition. Zhongyang Luo: Supervision.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge the support from The National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFB0603300).

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