Performance Assessment of Coal Fired Power Plant Integrated with Calcium Looping CO2 Capture Process

CaL technology is a promising means for post-combustion CO2 capture in already existing power plants, and heat integration is an effective way to lower the efficiency penalty caused by CO2 capture. Three cases with different heat integration degree were investigated in the manuscript to predict the efficiency penalty and the specific energy consumption for CO2 capture, aiming to find the optimum scheme of integrating capture unit into coal-fired power plant. The sensitivity analysis was also conducted to compare the impacts of key parameters. The simulation results show that the Case 3, which employs a variety of measures to improve the internal heat integration within CaL and reclaims the surplus released heat via an additional steam cycle, has the lowest efficiency penalty, 5.75%. It also indicates that heat integration in Case 3 results in a 14.4% of decrease in coal consumption, a 5.8% of reduction in power consumed by CO2 compression process, a 13.6% of drop in power consumption in ASU, and a 31.5% of decrease in specific energy consumption for CO2 capture. The sensitivity analysis shows that the efficiency penalty may be reduced by 0.011 percentage points for each degree decrease in temperature difference of MH-1. As the compression efficiency increases from 70% to 85%, the efficiency penalty decreases from 6.51% to 5.47%, and the specific energy consumption reduces from 2.21 MJ/kg CO2 to 1.80 MJ/kg CO2.