Stephen J. Gerdemann, Thomas Ochs, Danylo Oryshchyn, and Cathy Summers. National Energy Technology Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, 1450 Queen Avenue, SW, Albany, OR 973212152
Oxy-fuel combustion of coal uses oxygen rather than air as an oxidant resulting in a flue gas containing primarily CO2 and water. Using NETL's Integrated Pollutant Removal (IPR) process the flue gas can be cooled condensing and removing the water, and then compressed to produce a CO2 stream suitable for sequestration. The cost of energy for producing the oxygen and running the compressors reduces the efficiency a sub critical pulverized coal power plant approximately 5 percentage points from 35 to 30%. By careful design it is possible to recover some of this energy improving the efficiency to 33%. Models of an oxy-combustion power plant with IPR show how material and energy flow through the process and where energy can be recovered. In conjunction with the modeling effort an instrumented IPR process is being constructed at the Jupiter Oxygen oxy-combustion burner test facility. These experiments will measure gas composition as well as temperatures, pressures and flow rates throughout the process. These results will then be used to further refine the model of the process. The results will also be used in new computational fluid dynamics models as well as in economic models.