Front-End Engineering Design Study for Hybrid Gas Turbine and Ultra-Supercritical Coal Boiler Concept Plant with Post Combustion Carbon Capture

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) is leading a project to complete a Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) for a Hybrid Gas Turbine and USC Coal Boiler Concept (HGCC) with post combustion carbon capture and energy storage system. This project ties together several strands of DOE research in a single next-generation plant design for the use of clean fossil energy. This project combines a state-of-the-art 270 MW ultra-supercritical (USC) coal boiler subsystem with an 87 MW natural gas combustion turbine generator (CTG) subsystem, a 50 MW energy storage system (ESS) subsystem, a post combustion carbon capture (PCC) subsystem, and an algae-based CO2 utilization subsystem. This combination offers tremendous potential for high-energy efficiency, effective handling of variable customer demand with associated high ramp rates and minimum loads, and with reduced capital, operation and maintenance costs, while significantly reducing regulated emissions and capturing and reusing CO2. The host site is City, Water, Power, and Light (CWLP) in Springfield, Illinois. Investment cases will be developed for CWLP (retrofit site) and at least two other geographically diverse locations that use different coal types. Current greenfield sites to be examined are in Wyoming (Powder River Basin coal) and North Dakota (lignite). This project is part of the DOE’s 21st Century Power Plant initiative, which seeks to advance power generation along with hydrogen production beyond today’s state-of-the-art to make power plants more adaptive to the electrical grid with net zero carbon emission by 2035. R&D resulting from this initiative will underpin power plants that are capable of flexible operations to meet the needs of the grid; use innovative cutting-edge components that improve efficiency and reduce emissions to achieve net zero carbon; provide resilient power along with hydrogen to Americans; are small compared to today’s conventional utility-scale power plants; and will transform how power plant technologies are designed and manufactured.U.S. Department of Energy ; DE-FE0031995Ope