CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 35, 2013 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Petar Varbanov, Jiří Klemeš, Panos Seferlis, Athanasios I. Papadopoulos, Spyros Voutetakis Copyright © 2013, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l., ISBN 978-88-95608-26-6; ISSN 1974-9791 Assessment of Carbon Capture Options for Super-Critical Coal-based Power Plants Calin-Cristian Cormos*, Ana-Maria Cormos, Paul Serban Agachi Babes – Bolyai University, Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, 11 Arany Janos Street, RO-400028, Cluj – Napoca, Romania cormos@chem.ubbcluj.ro Power generation is one of the industrial sectors with major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. For climate change mitigation, a special attention is given to the reduction of CO2 emissions by applying capture and storage techniques in which CO2 is captured and then stored in suitable safe geologic locations. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are expected to play a significant role in the coming decades for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and to ensure a sustainable development of power generation and other energy-intensive industrial sectors (e.g. cement, metallurgy, petro-chemical etc.). This paper evaluates super-critical coal-based power plants with and without carbon capture. The analysis is geared toward quantification of main plant performance indicators such as: fuel consumption, gross and net energy efficiency, ancillary energy consumption, carbon capture rate, specific CO2 emissions, capital costs, specific capital investments and operational costs etc. For CCS configurations, two post-combustion CO2 capture options were considered. The first option is based gas-liquid absorption using a chemical solvent (methyl-diethanol-amine – MDEA etc.). The second option is based on calcium looping cycle, in which the carbonation/calcination sequence of CaO/CaCO3 system is used for carbon capture. The power plant case studies investigated in the paper produces around 950 – 1,100 MW net power with at least 90 % carbon capture rate. The mathematical modelling and simulation of the whole power generation schemes will produce the input data for quantitative techno-economic and environmental evaluations of power plants with carbon capture (similar power plant concept without CCS was used as reference for comparison). Mass and energy integration tools were used to assess the integration aspects of evaluated carbon capture options in the whole power plant design, to optimise the overall energy efficiency and to evaluate the main sources of energy penalty for CCS designs. 1. Introduction Energy supply at competitive and affordable prices, environmental protection and climate change prevention by reducing greenhouse gas emissions are one of the main issues that modern society is facing. It is known that fossil fuels used in power generation and other energy-intensive sectors are one of the main responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and this situation is predicted to continue for the years to come. If no action is taken to significantly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions (mainly CO2), severe climatic consequences are predicted. The key to preventing all these issues is to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing CO2 emissions can be done in a variety of methods as presented by International Energy Agency (2012), e.g. large scale applications of CCS technologies (Metz et al., 2005), increasing the renewable energy share in the energy mix, increasing energy efficiency (both in term of energy conversion and utilization processes), fuel switching etc. This paper evaluates two post-combustion carbon capture options for super-critical power plants. Among various carbon capture options, one mature technology based on gas - liquid absorption using chemical solvent (activated MDEA) and one promising but yet in the development stage based on calcium looping cycle were evaluated. The first carbon capture option based on chemical gas - liquid absorption is a proven technology in chemical industry (Kohl and Nielsen, 1997) but its integration in power plants is still in the pilot stage (scale in the range of 20 - 50 MW). One of the main issue here is the reducing the energy DOI: 10.3303/CET1335061 Please cite this article as: Cormos C.C., Cormos A.M., Agachi P.S., 2013, Assessment of carbon capture options for super-critical coal- based power plants, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 35, 367-372 DOI:10.3303/CET1335061 367