Water recovery potential from flue gases from natural gas and coal-fired thermal power plants: A Brazilian case study

Abstract

Single and combined steam cycle thermal power plants consume high amounts of water due to condenser cooling and steam generation operations. At the same time, there have been reductions in the supply of this important resource in many regions around the World. This fact has brought technical and environmental discussions along with research on the development of technologies in order to set new strategies to mitigate the problem, such as reutilizing and recovering water from processes. Although thermal power plants consume water intensively in its cooling process and vapor production, they also produce water from the combustion process of hydrocarbon fuels; the water vapor produced is released to the atmosphere. In this sense, this work aims at estimating the amount of water vapor present in the flue gas. For that, a data basis having the operational parameters of thirty-six Brazilian thermal power plants has been used, of which twenty-two are powered by natural gas (single and combined cycles) and fourteen powered by mineral coal (single cycles). The study also considers environmental conditions of the operation site, typical cycle efficiency, and fuel composition employed.