Oxyfuel Combustion CO₂ Capture for Power Plants – solid fuels

The combustion with high purity oxygen makes for a high concentration of CO₂ in the flue gas (>80%), from which the remaining water vapour is removed by cooling and compressing the gas stream resulting in high purity CO₂ (IPCC, 2005). The main cost component is therefore not in the CO₂ capture, but in the cryogenic air separation for oxygen production. There may be different requirements for flue gas cleaning depending on the fuel used (dust filters, NOx removal, sulphur scrubbers, etc.) which will influence performance and costs. The performance and cost ranges are considered to be sufficiently close for the variety of solid fuels to group them together in one factsheet.

The focus of this factsheet is solely on oxyfuel combustion CCS at power plants operating on solid fuels. Solid fuel power plants without CCS are used as a reference (super)critical coal/lignite, solid biomass power plant, etc.) and all reported data is relative to the reference plants (e.g. investment costs are additional costs for oxygen production and carbon capture, the reported data does not include investment costs for the power plant itself). Plants can be retrofitted with oxyfuel CCS technology (JRC, 2014).

Compression and dehydration are part of the CO₂ capture process. Reports on CO₂ pressure after capture vary from 11 MPa to 15 MPa (Rubin et al., 2015a; IPCC, 2005). At these pressure levels it is possible to transport the CO₂ through low-pressure pipelines (maximum pressure of 4.8 MPa) or high-pressure pipelines (minimum of 9.6 MPa) (IPCC 2005) without any additional compression required. If CO₂ is transported in liquid state, then additional compression will be required. Transport by pipeline is considered the default option and compression costs and energy requirements are therefore not included in the factsheet.