Concept for a competitive coal fired integrated gasification combined cycle power plant

The design efficiency for a stare-of-the-art supercritical coal fired pulverised fuel (p.f.) power plant (e.g. Nordjyllandsvaerket) is quoted at 47%, compared to 43% for the most advanced existing coal-based integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants (e.g. Buggenum and Puertollano), Of course, power plant design engineers have the experience of thousands of p.f. plants to guide them, compared with a mere handful of IGCC plants. There are also climatic and feedstock reasons why the above comparison is not a fair one. However, there is no doubt that for the environmentally friendly IGCC plants to penetrate the coal based power generation market it is necessary to demonstrate improved efficiency, reduced costs and increased availability. A number of techno-economic studies have been undertaken to see what is possible for IGCC, starting from the situation at Puertollano in Spain. These studies firstly remove the differences caused by the feedstock and the climatic conditions and then go on to look at an advanced IGCC concept that has been developed based on materials, components and processes that are available now. With the advanced IGCC concept it has been shown that the efficiency can be improved to over 50%, with an investment of less than 1000/kWe. Future development work on IGCC would be more profitably directed towards reducing capital costs and improving occupancy rather than efficiency improvements. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.