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The potential role of natural gas power plants with carbon capture and storage as a bridge to a low-carbon future
Citation:
Babaee, S. AND Dan Loughlin. The potential role of natural gas power plants with carbon capture and storage as a bridge to a low-carbon future. Presented at 34th USAEE/IAEE North America Conference, Tulsa, OK, October 23 - 26, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
Energy modeling to identify pathways for mitigating climate change often point to the role of natural gas combined-cycle (NGCC) turbines as a potential bridge to a low-CO2 energy system. A tangent on this result is to site and construct new NGCC capacity such that it can be retrofit with carbon capture and sequestration (NGCC-CCS) equipment. As such, NGCC might not just be a bridge, but instead could be a principal component of the future low-CO2 energy system. Here, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to explore the factors that may affect the competitiveness, costs, and benefits of NGCC-CCS.
Description:
The CO2 intensity of electricity produced by state-of-the-art natural gas combined-cycle turbines (NGCC) is approximately one-third that of the U.S. fleet of existing coal plants. Compared to new nuclear plants and coal plants with integrated carbon capture, NGCC has a lower investment cost, shorter construction time, and new plants can more easily be sited. NGCC can also be fitted with carbon capture equipment either during construction or as a retrofit. As a result, NGCC is seen as a potential bridge to a low-CO2 future, which would increasingly rely on technologies such as wind, solar, advanced nuclear, and carbon capture as those technologies mature [Cole et al. (2016), Nichols and Victor (2015), and C2ES (2013)]. A logical approach may be to displace coal with new NGCC in the near-term, building NGCC near geological storage sites. Later the NGCC could be retrofit with CO2 capture (NGCC-CCS) when the regulatory or economic drivers are in place [IEA (2007)]. There are, however, technical challenges to widespread deployment of NGCC-CCS. First, fugitive methane emissions associated with natural gas production, transmission, and distribution processes could offset some of the climate benefits of using natural gas [McJeon et al. (2014)]. Second, applying carbon capture retrofit technologies to NGCC results in cost and energy penalties [Teir et al. (2010)], both of which affect its competitiveness. Third, the lower carbon content of natural gas may yield difficulties in capturing CO2 economically [Rubin et al. (2012)]. Fourth, stringent GHG reduction targets may make natural gas plants less attractive in the long-term, even with carbon capture since these plants would still have some CO2 emissions [Cole et al. (2016)]. Answers to the following questions are necessary to understand more fully the potential role of NGCC-CCS: How is NGCC-CCS competiveness affected by technology assumptions (e.g., NGCC cost and efficiency; CO2 capture cost and capture rate), fuel prices (e.g., for natural gas and competing fuels), technological developments in competing technologies (e.g., in wind, solar, and advanced nuclear power), lifetime extensions of existing electricity production capacity (e.g., nuclear plants), the stringency of CO2 reduction targets, and whether these targets account for upstream methane leakage? Furthermore, is NGCC-CCS more competitive as a low-CO2 bridge technology in some parts of the country than others?