Techno-economic analysis of biomass/coal Co-gasification IGCC systems with supercritical steam bottom cycle and carbon capture

SUMMARY In recent years, integrated gasification combined cycle technology has been gaining steady popularity for use in clean coal power operations with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). This study focuses on investigating two approaches to improve efficiency and further reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. First, replace the traditional subcritical Rankine steam cycle portion of the overall plant with a supercritical steam cycle. Second, add different amounts of biomass as feedstock to reduce emissions. Employing biomass as a feedstock has the advantage of being carbon neutral or even carbon negative if CCS is implemented. However, due to limited feedstock supply, such plants are usually small (2–50 MW), which results in lower efficiency and higher capital and production costs. Considering these challenges, it is more economically attractive and less technically challenging to co-combust or co-gasify biomass wastes with low-rank coals. Using the commercial software, Thermoflow®, this study analyzes the baseline plants around 235 MW and 267 MW for the subcritical and supercritical designs, respectively. Both post-combustion and pre-combustion CCS conditions are considered. The results clearly show that utilizing a certain type of biomass with low-rank coals up to 50% (wt.) can, in most cases, not only improve the efficiency and reduce overall emissions but may be economically advantageous, as well. Beyond a 10% Biomass Ratio, however, the efficiency begins to drop due to the rising pretreatment costs, but the system itself still remains more efficient than from using coal alone (between 0.2 and 0.3 points on average). The CO2 emissions decrease by about 7000 tons/MW-year compared to the baseline (no biomass), making the plant carbon negative with only 10% biomass in the feedstock. In addition, implementing a supercritical steam cycle raises the efficiency (1.6 percentage points) and lowers the capital costs ($300/kW), regardless of plant layout. Implementing post-combustion CCS consistently causes a drop in efficiency (at least 7–8 points) from the baseline and increases the costs by $3000–$4000/kW and $0.06–$0.07/kW-h. The SOx emissions also decrease by about 190 tons/year (7.6 × 10−6 tons/MW-year). Finally, the CCS cost is around $65–$72 per ton of CO2. For pre-combustion CCS, sour shift appears to be superior both economically and thermally to sweet shift in the current study. Sour shift is always cheaper, (by a difference of about $600/kW and $0.02-$0.03/kW-h), easier to implement, and also 2–3 percentage points more efficient. The economic difference is fairly marginal, but the trend is inversely proportional to the efficiency, with cost of electricity decreasing by 0.5 cents/kW-h from 0% to 10% biomass ratio (BMR) and rising 2.5 cents/kW-h from 10% to 50% BMR. Pre-combustion CCS plants are smaller than post-combustion ones and usually require 25% less energy for CCS due to their compact size for processing fuel flow only under higher pressure (450 psi), versus processing the combusted gases at near-atmospheric pressure. Finally, the CO2 removal cost for sour shift is around $20/ton, whereas sweet shift's cost is around $30/ton, which is much cheaper than that of post-combustion CCS: about $60–$70/ton. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.