CO2 recovery in a power plant with chemical looping combustion

This paper points out the features of CO2 recovery in a novel power plant by employing a chemical-looping combustor. This chemical-looping combustor consists of the two reactors; fuel reacts with metal oxide, the reduced metal reacts with oxygen in air, and both reactions proceed with no visible flame. For this reason, the proposed LNG-fueled power generation system with the chemical-looping combustor has the following major advantages: (a) Since the thermal efficiency of this plant may reach a new-generation level, i.e., higher than 60% (based on LHV), the generation of CO2 per kWh electricity can significantly be decreased to 0.33 kg-CO2/kWh; (b) This combustor does not need pure oxygen which requires high power consumption for O-2 generation, say for O-2/CO2 combustor; (c) Due to the presence of only CO2 gas and water vapor in the exhaust gas from the fuel reactor, CO2 is highly concentrated and may easily be recovered by condensation of the water vapor without any extra cost which is generally large in conventional separation processes based on absorption (MEA, Selexol), adsorption (PSA, TSA), membranes, or cryogenics etc. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.