Prospects for cost-effective post-combustion CO2 capture from industrial CHPs

Industrial Combined Heat and Power plants (CHPs) are often operated at partial load conditions. If CO2 is captured from a CHP, additional energy requirements can be fully or partly met by increasing the load. Load increase improves plant efficiency and, consequently, part of the additional energy consumption would be offset. If this advantage is large enough, industrial CHPs may become an attractive option for CO2 capture and storage CCS. We therefore investigated the techno-economic performance of post-combustion CO2 capture from small-to-medium-scale (50–200 MWe maximum electrical capacity) industrial Natural Gas Combined Cycle- (NGCC-) CHPs in comparison with large-scale (400 MWe) NGCCs in the short term (2010) and the mid-term future (2020–2025). The analyzed system encompasses NGCC, CO2 capture, compression, and branch CO2 pipeline. The technical results showed that CO2 capture energy requirement for industrial NGCC-CHPs is significantly lower than that for 400 MWe NGCCs: up to 16% in the short term and up to 12% in the mid-term future. The economic results showed that at low heat-to-power ratio operations, CO2 capture from industrial NGCC-CHPs at 100 MWe in the short term (41–44 €/tCO2 avoided) and 200 MWe in the mid-term future (33–36 €/tCO2 avoided) may compete with 400 MWe NGCCs (46–50 €/tCO2 avoided short term, 30–35 €/tCO2 avoided mid-term).