Prospects for cost-effective post-combustion CO 2 capture from industrial CHPs

Abstract

Industrial Combined Heat and Power plants (CHPs) are often operated at partial load conditions. If CO 2 is captured from a CHP, additional energy requirements can be fully or partly met by increasing the load. Load increase improves plant efficiency and, consequently, part of the additional energy consumption would be offset. If this advantage is large enough, industrial CHPs may become an attractive option for CO 2 capture and storage CCS. We therefore investigated the techno-economic performance of post-combustion CO 2 capture from small-to-medium-scale (50–200 MWe maximum electrical capacity) industrial Natural Gas Combined Cycle- (NGCC-) CHPs in comparison with large-scale (400 MWe) NGCCs in the short term (2010) and the mid-term future (2020–2025). The analyzed system encompasses NGCC, CO 2 capture, compression, and branch CO 2 pipeline. The technical results showed that CO 2 capture energy requirement for industrial NGCC-CHPs is significantly lower than that for 400 MWe NGCCs: up to 16% in the short term and up to 12% in the mid-term future. The economic results showed that at low heat-to-power ratio operations, CO 2 capture from industrial NGCC-CHPs at 100 MWe in the short term (41–44 €/tCO 2 avoided) and 200 MWe in the mid-term future (33–36 €/tCO 2 avoided) may compete with 400 MWe NGCCs (46–50 €/tCO 2 avoided short term, 30–35 €/tCO 2 avoided mid-term).