Performance and Economic Analysis of Biomass/Coal Co-Gasification IGCC Systems with Supercritical Steam Bottom Cycle, Part 1 – Post-combustion Carbon Capture

(IGCC) technology has been gaining steady popularity for use in clean coal power operations with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). This study focuses on investigating two approaches to improve efficiency and further reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. First, replace the traditional subcritical Rankine steam cycle portion of the overall plant with a supercritical steam cycle. Second, add different amounts of biomass as feedstock to reduce emissions. Part 1 focuses on investigating post-combustion CCS and Part 2 on analyzing pre-combustion CCS, using both sour-shift and sweet-shift processes. Employing biomass as a feedstock has the advantage of being carbon neutral or even carbon negative if CCS is implemented. However, due to limited feedstock supply, such plants are usually small (2-50MW), which results in lower efficiency and higher capital and production costs