Repowering with clean coal technologies

Repowering with clean coal technology can offer significant advantages, including lower heat rates and production costs, environmental compliance, incremental capacity increases, and life extension of existing facilities. Significant savings of capital costs can result by refurbishing and reusing existing sites and infrastructure relative to a greenfield siting approach. This paper summarizes some key results of a study performed by Parsons Power Group, Inc., under a contract with DOE/METC, which investigates many of the promising advanced power generation technologies in a repowering application. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the technical and economic results of applying each of a menu of Clean Coal Technologies in a repowering of a hypothetical representative fossil fueled power station. Pittsburgh No. 8 coal is used as the fuel for most of the cases evaluated herein, as well as serving as the fuel for the original unrepowered station. The steam turbine-generator, condenser, and circulating water system are refurbished and reused in this study, as is most of the existing site infrastructure such as transmission lines, railroad, coal yard and coal handling equipment, etc. The technologies evaluated in this study consisted of an atmospheric fluidized bed combustor, several varieties of pressurized fluid bed combustors, several types of gasifiers, a refueling with a process derived fuel, and, for reference, a natural gas fired combustion turbine-combined cycle