Thermal Integration of a Flexible Calcium Looping CO2 Capture System in an Existing Back-Up Coal Power Plant

Abstract

The CO₂ capture from back-up power plants by making use of calcium looping systems combined with large piles of Ca-solids has been studied in this work. A flexible CO₂ capture system based on a concept described in a previous work has been integrated into an existing power plant by including a small oxy-fired calciner (that represents just 8% of the total thermal capacity) to steadily regenerate the sorbent and a carbonator reactor following the back-up power plant operation periods to capture 90% of the CO₂ as CaCO₃ and two large piles of rich CaO and CaCO₃ solids stored at modest temperatures. When the back-up plant enters into operation, the calcined solids are brought into contact with the flue gases in the carbonator reactor; meanwhile, the oxy-calciner operates continuously at a steady state. In order to improve the flexibility of the CO₂ capture system and to minimize the increase of CO₂ capture costs associated with the additional new equipment used only during the brief back-up periods, we propose using the steam cycle of the existing power plant to recover a large fraction of the heat available from the streams leaving the carbonator. This makes it possible to maintain the electrical power output but reducing the thermal input to the power plant by 12% and thus the size of the associated CO₂ capture equipment. To generate the auxiliary power required for the oxy-calciner block, a small steam cycle is designed by integrating the waste heat from the streams leaving this reactor. By solving the mass and heat balances and proposing a feasible thermal integration scheme by using Aspen Hysys, it has been calculated that the CO₂ emitted by long-amortized power plants operated as back-up can be captured with a net efficiency of 28%.