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Replies to post #14650 on High Wire Networks Inc (HWNI)
The United States Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology laboratory (DOE/NETL) recently announced multiple funding awards focused on advanced oxy-combustion as a means to increase the efficiency of future coal-fired power generation with carbon capture.
Atmospheric pressure oxy-combustion has been under development in the EU, UK, USA, Australia and Asia for a number of years. In fact, the DOE has allocated $1 Billion for the world’s largest proposed atmospheric oxy-combustion project, FutureGen 2.0, planned to produce 200MWe from coal and sequester the CO2 in an approved site.
While the DOE feels that atmospheric oxy-combustion in slightly superior to the current state of amine based capture systems, analysis indicates that it still will not meet the DOE’s long term cost and performance targets, and as such, the DOE recently awarded multiple contracts for the next generation of advanced oxy-combustion. The goal of the advanced oxy-combustion awards is to evaluate and develop technologies that can achieve greater than 90% CO2 capture at a cost less than $25/ton applicable to both retrofit and new coal fired power plants.
Two major technical routes were funded as part of the overall award: Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) and Pressurized Oxy-Combustion. Alstom, Babcock and Wilcox and the University of Kentucky Research foundation were selected for CLC programs. The main object of CLC is to reduce the inherent cost of oxygen by using a solid “carrier” which can be oxidized in air, thereby avoiding the cost of producing oxygen by typical air separation technologies, and using coal or another hydrocarbon to reduce the solid “carrier” back to a state where it can be looped back to the oxidation reactor.
One key difference between CLC and conventional power production is that the heat is produced by oxidation of the carrier, not the hydrocarbon. Lower exhaust gas temperatures, solids handling, and coal ash residuals/carrier poisoning are issues which will likely be addressed.
Selections in the Pressurized Oxy-Combustion category were given to Unity Power Alliance, Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, the Gas Technology Institute, the Southwest Research Institute, and Washington University. Advantages of operating in a pressurized regime include higher combustion efficiency and heat transfer rates, reduced equipment sizing (CAPEX and footprint implications), as well as higher CO2 concentrations by eliminating air in-leakages.
As opposed to CLC, the pressurized oxy-combustion solutions will almost assuredly take advantage of improvements in the well-proven Air Separation Unit (ASU) technologies roadmap, including the potential incorporation of ion transport technologies, the use of low-purity oxygen solutions like VPSA, and will certainly include energy integration, thereby lowering the “risk” profile and improving time to market.
Unity Power Alliance technology
The Unity Power Alliance (UPA) award team includes ThermoEnergy of Massachusetts, ITEA SPA of Italy, MIT, and Georgia Tech, (UPA is a joint venture between ThermoEnergy and ITEA). The program is fundamentally geared around optimizing, not proving, Pressurized Oxy-Combustion.
The core of the technology being optimized involves a “flameless” combustion system that was developed by ENEL of Italy and ITEA. The “flameless” system is already successfully operating at a 5MWth scale at four atmospheres pressure.
Key advantages of the “flameless” combustor system already proven include:
• Dramatic reduction in the scope of the CO2 Purification Unit, or “CPU”
• Elimination of fly ash by creating an inert, non-leachable, vitrified slag
• Operational Robustness including the ability to successfully handle low rank coals
The ability to substantially reduce the size and complexity of the CPU is a major step in itself as the CPU has shown itself to be both complex and capital intensive in atmospheric oxy-combustion systems. Actual data from operations without any CPU are provided in the Table.
UPA?project
The first key part of UPA’s program is a techno-economic modeling optimization to be conducted by MIT, as previous studies have indicated, the optimum pressure may in fact be higher than 4 atmospheres. One important technical advantage of raising the pressure of the system is the ability to capture the latent heat of vaporization of the water, increasing the system’s overall efficiency and dramatically reducing the overall plants water footprint.
The new Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions (CNES) laboratory at Georgia Tech will host the second major part of the project: testing the “flameless” reactor over a wide range of pressures. While proven at 4 Bar, flue, slag, and water analysis will be gathered over a series of pressures which will then be analyzed in conjunction with the techno-economic modeling conducted by MIT.
After completion of the first phase of the DOE awards, it is anticipated that a much larger Phase II will occur for both the “most promising” CLC and Pressurized Oxy-Combustion technology. The goal of the Phase II program would be to advance the selected technologies to a pilot stage at a suitable host site. The fact that the “flameless” technology has been successfully operating at a 5 and 15 MWth scale and ENEL and ITEA have already done considerable engineering on both the scale-up to a 50MWth Pilot and a 320MWe system, lowers the risk profile and accelerates commercialization.
All of the next generation technologies under consideration will advance the interests of utilities, the communities and jobs they support, and job creation in the engineering sector, not to mention the environment.
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