Exploring the potential for improvement of the energy performance of coal fired power plants with post-combustion capture of carbon dioxide

The application of post-combustion capture (PCC) processes in coal fired power stations can result in large reductions of the CO2-emissions, but the consequential decrease in generation efficiency is an important draw-back. The leading PCC technology is based on chemical absorption processes as this technology is the one whose scale-up status is closest to full-scale capture in power plants. The energy performance of this process is analysed in this contribution. The analysis shows that the potential for improvement of the energy performance is quite large. It is demonstrated that further development of the capture technology and the power plant technology can lead to generation efficiencies for power plants with 90% CO2 capture which are equivalent to the current generation efficiencies without CO2 capture, i.e. 0.4 (HHV), leading to an additional resource consumption of 16%. These improvements are possible throughout a combined improvement for the capture process and power generation processes.