Techno-economic evaluation of advanced IGCC lignite coal fuelled power plants with CO2 capture

The techno-economic evaluation of four novel integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plants fuelled with low rank lignite coal with CO2 capture facility has been investigated using ECLIPSE process simulator. The performance of the proposed plants was compared with two conventional IGCC plants with and without CO2 capture. The proposed plants include an advanced CO2 capturing process based on the Absorption Enhanced Reforming (AER) reaction and the regeneration of sorbent materials avoiding the need for sulphur removal component, shift reactor and/or a high temperature gas cleaning process. The results show that the proposed CO2 capture plants efficiencies were 18.5–21% higher than the conventional IGCC CO2 capture plant. For the proposed plants, the CO2 capture efficiencies were found to be within 95.8–97%. The CO2 capture efficiency for the conventional IGCC plant was 87.7%. The specific investment costs for the proposed plants were between 1207 and 1479 €/kWe and 1620 €/kWe and 1134 €/kWe for the conventional plants with and without CO2 capture respectively. Overall the proposed IGCC plants are cleaner, more efficient and produce electricity at cheaper price than the conventional IGCC process.