Techno-economic assessment of fossil fuel power plants with CO2 capture – Results of EU H2-IGCC project

•A techno-economic study of different fossil fuel power plants is presented.•Efficiency loss due to CO2 capture is the lowest for natural gas combined cycle.•The cost of electricity (COE) and CO2 avoided costs are also presented.•The COE for natural gas combined cycle among plants without capture is the highest.•The COE for supercritical pulverized coal among plants with capture is the highest.

In order to address the ever-increasing demand for electricity, need for security of energy supply, and to stabilize global warming, the European Union co-funded the H2-IGCC project, which aimed to develop and demonstrate technological solutions for future generation integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC1) plants with carbon capture. As a part of the main goal, this study evaluates the performance of the selected IGCC plant with CO2 capture from a techno-economic perspective. In addition, a comparison of techno-economic performance between the IGCC plant and other dominant fossil-based power generation technologies, i.e. an advanced supercritical pulverized coal (SCPC2) and a natural gas combined cycle (NGCC3), have been performed and the results are presented and discussed here. Different plants are economically compared with each other using the cost of electricity and the cost of CO2 avoided. Moreover, an economic sensitivity analysis of every plant considering the realistic variation of the most uncertain parameters is given.