Abstract
This paper presents the findings of the techno-economic assessment undertaken by Wood for the UK Government Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on the large-scale deployment of Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells (MCFCs) for post-combustion CO2 capture integrated with a new build combined cycle gas turbine power plant for the generation of low carbon electricity. The findings are compared with a state of the art proprietary amine scrubbing technology. Based on a new build power plant to be installed in the North East of England, with a power train comprising two trains of H-class gas turbines each with a dedicated steam turbine, the configuration presented utilises MCFCs between the gas turbine exhausts and their heat recovery steam generators and cryogenic separation for unconverted fuel recycle and CO2 purification. It was found that the proposed configuration could achieve 92% CO2 capture from the overall power plant with MCFCs while achieving 42% of additional new power production with only 2.6 %-points of thermal efficiency penalty compared to a conventional proprietary amine benchmark. While the total project capital cost increased by 65%, the high overall thermal efficiency and additional power generated resulted in a Levelised Cost of Electricity almost identical to the benchmark at £70/MWh (US$97/MWh). A number of areas are identified for potential further improvement in this scheme. It is concluded that use of MCFC technology, which also has the capability to be tailored for hydrogen production and combined heat and power services, shows significant potential to be competitive with, or exceed, the cost and technical performance of current state of the art technologies for post-combustion CO2 capture.
Highlights
In 2018, Wood completed an in-depth study for UK Government Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on the most promising CO2 capture technologies for large scale production of low carbon electricity and hydrogen including benchmarks for current state-of-the-art technologies as and two novel technologies (Department for Business et al, 2018).While both molten carbonate fuel cells (MCFCs) and solid oxide fuel cells facilitate CO2 capture, and low carbon electricity generation, by keeping the fuel stream and the oxidant streams separate, MCFCs go one step further by transferring CO2 from the oxidant side of the cell to the fuel side
This study presents findings of a techno-economic assessment comparing the use of MCFCs and proprietary amine-based solvents for baseload low carbon power generation using post combustion CO2 capture
It was found that incorporating MCFCs between each gas turbine and its respective heat recovery steam generator, using cryogenic separation to purify the CO2 and recycling the unconverted fuel species back to the fuel cell could achieve 92% CO2 capture by adding 440 MWe of fuel cells
Summary
Details of additional basis assumptions, including infrastructure connections, design and regulatory costs, startup, maintenance, labour, and so forth can be found in Potential Configurations for CCGTs With MCFC Post Combustion CO2 Capture of the public domain report on the study for the UK Government (Department for Business et al, 2018) This case consists of a natural gas fired combined cycle power plant based upon 2 GE Frame 9HA. gas turbines each with a dedicated heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) and steam turbine in a 2 × 2 configuration. The results presented in this paper have drawn upon years of development undertaken by others investigating potential flow scheme configurations to integrate MCFCs with CCGTs. we are confident that further optimisation of heat integration alternatives vs capital and operating costs could result in a more cost effective or more thermally efficient scheme, paying attention to heat recovery from the fuel cell exhaust gas. The ability to add alternative revenue streams via hydrogen sales can substantially improve the already competitive performance of this technology for post-combustion CO2 capture compared to conventional state-of-the-art technologies
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