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).