Packed Bed Ca-Cu Looping Process Integrated with a Natural Gas Combined Cycle for Low Emission Power Production

This work investigates the full process design of a natural gas combined cycle integrated with a packed-bed reactor system where a hydrogen rich gas is produced with inherent CO2 capture based of the CaO/CaCO3 and Cu/CuO chemical loops. The different stages of this Ca-Cu process were modelled with a dynamic 1D pseudo-homogeneous model, proposing a novel reactor configuration allowing to achieve carbon capture efficiency close to 90%. Process simulations of the whole power plant resulted in electric efficiencies of around 48%LHV and SPECCA of 4.7 MJ/kgCO2.