Economic evaluation of an IGCC cogeneration power plant with CCS for application in China

In China polygeneration from coal via gasification is seen as a promising technology that responds to the issues of security of energy supply and climate change. However, the implementation of coal-gasification schemes is still hampered with a comparatively low operational availability, and the relative cost imposed by polygeneration is deemed high. First, the capital expenses become higher due to the more comprehensive processing scheme including oxygen production. Second, the inclusion of CCS will affect the operating cost owing to additional staff and reduced revenues, as there will be less electricity to sell. Third, the maintenance cost tends to grow due to increased complexity. A new virtual IGCC-CCS1 power cycle has been defined, which forms the base case for benchmarking. A reference case has been formed using the prestigious Chinese GreenGen project (phase 1) as model. The two cases are based with identical gasifiers as the core component. In contrast to the reference case using a gas turbine fuelled with syngas and without CO2 capture, the virtual power cycle is made up using a generic hydrogen-burning gas turbine subsequent to an integrated gas separation unit in which CO2 is removed (jointly with H2S). Hence, the two cases have been benchmarked in order to assess the impact of CO2 capture on cost - notably without the inclusion of polygeneration, despite that polygeneration was part of the study (with hydrogen, ammonia, methanol and DME as co-products additional to electric power). The importance of this work is to assess techno-economic gaps in order to identify areas to address in order to improve process schemes towards an elevated stage of maturity. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.