Techno-Economic Comparison of Coal Plants in India with Conventional and Advanced Power Generation Technologies Integrated with Calcium Looping Based CO2 Capture

Abstract

India is a country which primarily depends on coal to satisfy the bulk of its energy as well as electricity needs. However, the emissions from coal power plants, mainly CO2 and also other pollutants such as SOx, NOx, PM and Hg have several harmful effects on the environment and also on the health of the people. Currently, the Govt. of India has laid out certain emission standards to control the emissions of SOx, NOx, PM and Hg from coal fired power plants. However, as of today, there are no regulations for control of emissions of CO2. But, looking at the broader picture of India’s continued dependence on coal in the future, it is necessary to identify appropriate technologies for CO2 capture, given the large scale impacts, CO2 emissions have at the global level. For carbon mitigation from coal plants in India there have been research studies mainly on implementing advanced steam parameters, using post combustion technologies such as MEA, Membrane, using pre-combustion technologies such as IGCC along with CO2 capture using physical or chemical solvents, and oxy-combustion based direct CO2 capture. However, there are a host of other technology options available for carbon mitigation from coal power plants in India, which can be explored to compare their performance with the available options. This paper deals with the techno-economic comparison of an existing supercritical plant operating on the conventional pulverized coal combustion (PCC) technology with the advanced power generation technology of fluidized bed combustion (FBC), both of which are integrated with CO2 capture using a Calcium looping (CaL) based sorbent. The analysis is performed for the coal plants using an Indian coal. Also comparison with imported coal varieties (Indonesian and South African coal) is carried out. The techno-economic analysis would give a comparison of some parameters such as i) energy penalty, ii) Levelized cost of electricity (LCoE), and iii) CO2 avoidance cost for the above power plant configurations which are integrated with the calcium looping based CO2 capture system.