Review and techno-economic assessment of fuel cell technologies with CO2 capture

Abstract

The concept of using Fuel Cells (FCs) within large scale power generation cycles for CO2 capture has been studied over the last decade. Two types of FCs, Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) and Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells (MCFCs) have emerged as promising CO2 capture systems, with the added advantage of additional power production. Although promising, neither SOFCs nor MCFCs are commercially available for CO2 capture applications, primarily due to low technological maturity, lack of large demonstration projects, and significant associated costs.In this work, the aim is to provide a comprehensive literature review of Fuel Cell technologies with CO2 Capture and a techno-economic analysis of five selected cases utilising SOFCs and MCFCs as CO2 capture systems in power plants. Economic parameters were homogenised to enable a fair comparison between the technologies. Results show that Cases 1 and 5 which consider MCFCs as CO2 concentrator’s in Natural gas and super critical pulverised coal cycles respectively give the best LCOE performance. The LCOE is comparable to current state-of-the-art CO2 capture technologies applied to large-scale power plants.