Technoeconomic assessment of China’s indirect coal liquefaction projects with different CO2 capture alternatives

ICL (Indirect coal liquefaction), an alternative fuel-supplying technology, has drawn much attention and caused considerable debate in China’s energy sector. The hurdles to its development include the high risk of investment into large-scale installations, the high CO2 emissions and water resource consumption. A comprehensive assessment of ICL is urgently needed. This study provides an economic assessment and a technical analysis based on process simulations. To address the future challenge of curbing CO2 emissions, three absorption methods are compared for capturing the CO2 released from the ICL process: DMC (a novel absorbent), MEA and Rectisol. The comparative results suggest that physical absorbents, represented by Rectisol and DMC, have a remarkable advantage over chemical absorption processes, represented by MEA. The Rectisol process costs the least, while the DMC process is close to the same level. As a novel absorbent, DMC has the potential to be widely used in the future. The economic analysis of ICL predicted a high capital cost of over 35 billion yuan and an overall product cost of approximately 3800 yuan/ton for the baseline. In addition, via a sensitivity analysis, coal price, electricity price and capacity factor were identified as the three most influential factors affecting the overall product cost.

► We simulate the process of ICL process as well as three CO2 capture alternatives.
► We compare the three CO2 capture methods in terms of energy and economic performances.
► We calculate the capital cost and the operating cost of China’s ICL plant at a scale of 3 million tons/yr.
► Rectisol and DMC have remarkable advantages over MEA in capturing CO2 emitting from ICL process.
► The high capital cost and the uncertain energy market impose huge risks on investing China’s ICL projects.