The effects of scale-up and coal-biomass blending on supercritical coal oxy-combustion power plants

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) with biomass is called to be one of the most important technologies to reduce the climate change all over the world. In addition, supercritical pulverized coal plants have been pointed out as interesting power installations because its high efficiency. In this work, the effects of plants scaling and biomass-coal co-firing level on net present value (NPV), cost of energy (COE) and cost of CO2 avoided (CCA) have been studied on a supercritical pulverized combusting coal/biomass blends. Aspen Plus© was used to implement technical simulations. Finally, the main factors affecting plants viability were identified by a sensitivity analysis. The results obtained revealed that the use of biomass reduces the NPV in (−0.23,−1.75) M€/MWe, and increases the COE by (0.007,0.263) M€/MWe. However, plant scaling was found to be a more important factor, by reaching an impact of 4.32 M€/MWe on NPV variation in best case. The reduction of oxy-plants viability by biomass using as raw material could be compensated by an increasing of the designed scale-up. Finally, 300 MWe power plants with 40-50% biomass co-firing level were identified as a compromise solution between economy and risk, improving in this way the interest for potential investment.