Techno-Economic Evaluation of an IGCC Power Plant With Carbon Capture

Abstract

Most of the scenarios presented by different actors and organizations in the energy sector predict an increasing power demand in the coming years mainly due to the world’s population growth. Meanwhile, global warming is still one of the planet’s main concerns and carbon capture and sequestration is considered one of the key alternatives to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plant is a coal-derived power production technology which facilitates the pre-combustion capture of CO2 emissions. After the establishment of the baseline configuration of the IGCC plant with CO2 capture (reported in GT2011-45701), a techno-economic evaluation of the whole IGCC system is presented in this paper. Based on publicly available literature, a database was established to evaluate the cost of electricity (COE) for the plant using relevant cost scaling factors for the existing sub-systems, cost index, and financial parameters (such as discount rate and inflation rate). Moreover, an economic comparison has been carried out between the baseline IGCC plant, a natural gas combined cycle (NGCC), and a supercritical pulverized coal (SCPC) plant. The calculation results confirm that an IGCC plant is 180% more expensive than the NGCC. The overall efficiency of the IGCC plant with CO2 capture is 35.7% (LHV basis), the total plant cost (TPC) is 3,786 US$/kW, and the COE is 160 US$/MWh.