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Economic and environmental evaluation of flexible integrated gasification polygeneration facilities with carbon capture and storage
Citation:
Aitken, M., Dan Loughlin, R. Dodder, AND W. Yelverton. Economic and environmental evaluation of flexible integrated gasification polygeneration facilities with carbon capture and storage. AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA, December 15 - 19, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
Describes application of an energy system model to evaluate the role a novel electricity and liquid fuel production technology could play in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and the conditions under which that technology would be competitive.
Description:
One innovative option for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions involves pairing carbon capture and storage (CCS) with the production of synthetic fuels and electricity from co-processed coal and biomass. In this scheme, the feedstocks are first converted to syngas, from which a Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process reactor and combined cycle turbine produce liquid fuels and electricity, respectively. With low concentrations of sulfur and other contaminants, the synthetic fuels are expected to be cleaner than conventional crude oil products. And with CO2 as an inherent byproduct of the FT process, most of the GHG emissions can be eliminated by simply compressing the CO2 output stream for pipeline transport. In fact, the incorporation of CCS at such facilities can result in very low—or perhaps even negative—net GHG emissions, depending on the fraction of biomass as input and its CO2 signature.To examine the potential market penetration and environmental impact of coal and biomass to liquids and electricity (CBtLE), a system-wide analysis was performed using the MARKet ALlocation (MARKAL) energy model. With resource supplies, energy conversion technologies, end-use demands, costs, and pollutant emission rates as user-defined inputs, MARKAL calculates—using linear programming techniques—the least-cost set of technologies that satisfy the specified demands subject to environmental and policy constraints. In this framework, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed both national and regional databases to characterize a comprehensive set of technologies in the industrial, commercial, residential, transportation, and electricity generation sectors of the U.S. energy system. Here, the EPA U.S. nine-region (EPAUS9r) MARKAL database was updated to include the costs and emission characteristics of CBtLE using figures from the literature. Sensitivity analyses were then carried out to investigate the impact of various assumptions and scenarios, e.g., oil prices and CO2 mitigation targets.