A coal-fired power plant integrated with biomass co-firing and CO2 capture for zero carbon emission

A promising scheme for coal-fired power plants in which biomass co-firing and carbon dioxide capture technologies are adopted and the low-temperature waste heat from the CO2 capture process is recycled to heat the condensed water to achieve zero carbon emission is proposed in this paper. Based on a 660 MW supercritical coal-fired power plant, the thermal performance, emission performance, and economic performance of the proposed scheme are evaluated. In addition, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to show the effects of several key parameters on the performance of the proposed system. The results show that when the biomass mass mixing ratio is 15.40% and the CO2 capture rate is 90%, the CO2 emission of the coal-fired power plant can reach zero, indicating that the technical route proposed in this paper can indeed achieve zero carbon emission in coal-fired power plants. The net thermal efficiency decreases by 10.31%, due to the huge energy consumption of the CO2 capture unit. Besides, the cost of electricity (COE) and the cost of CO2 avoided (COA) of the proposed system are 80.37 $/MWh and 41.63 $/tCO(2), respectively. The sensitivity analysis demonstrates that with the energy consumption of the reboiler decreasing from 3.22 GJ/tCO(2) to 2.40 GJ/tCO(2), the efficiency penalty is reduced to 8.67%. This paper may provide reference for promoting the early realization of carbon neutrality in the power generation industry.