Carbon capture on a micro gas turbine: assessment of the performance

From all fossil fuel power production routes, the electricity produced with Gas Turbines (GTs) running on natural gas has the lowest CO2 emissions. However, if we want to move towards full carbon clean power production, the CO2 in the exhaust must be captured. The energy impact of a Carbon Capture plant (CC) applied to the micro Gas Turbine (mGT) still remains unclear because few quantitative analyses are available. The low concentration of CO2 in the GT exhaust gas is disadvantageous from a CC point of view. Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) is one of the technologies used to increase the CO2 concentration in the GT flue gas. It is potentially an effective method to reduce the high energy-penalty caused by the carbon capture. A typical capture method is an absorber-stripper system where the absorbent is commonly a 30wt% aqueous monoethanolamine (MEA) solution. In this work, a Turbec T100 mGT coupled with a chemical-absorption plant is considered. The entire plant has been simulated using Aspen Plus (R). Simulation results show that the specific reboiler duty is rather constant (around 4.3 MJ/kgCO(2)) when varying the electrical power output of the mGT. The cycle performance is strongly affected by the thermal energy requirement for the stripping process, decreasing the global electric efficiency around 6.2 absolute percentage points. These results could be a starting point for future energy integrations between the mGT and the CC plant. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.