Integration of power plant and amine scrubbing to reduce CO2 capture costs

Due to security, sustainability of supply, strategic and energetic dependence reasons, it is well accepted the necessity to continue using coal as main fuel for producing electricity from power plants. In order to reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, it is essential to develop carbon capture and storage technologies that lead to zero emissions fossil fuels power plants. Absorption by chemical solvents combined with CO2 long-term storage appears to offer interesting and commercial applicable CO2 capture technology. However, the high regeneration energy requirements make necessary a process optimization in large-scale power plants. Although actual CO2 capture cost remains around 55 €/ton CO2, the target is to maintain this cost below 25 €/ton CO2. This paper proposes different possibilities to overcome the energy requirements by means of amine scrubbing integration into a commercial power plant, and presents a technical and economical analysis of the performance of these approaches. Although some schemes show small efficiency penalties, it becomes essential to calculate specific cost per ton CO2, the main aim is to chose the proper configuration to implement large-scale cost-effective schemes that leads to CO2 capture demonstration projects.