Techno-Economic Assessment of Carbon Capture and Storage Facilities Coupled to Coal-Fired Power Plants

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities coupled to coal-fired power plants provide a climate change mitigation strategy that potentially permits the continued use of coal whilst reducing the carbon dioxide emissions. However, the still-high cost of CCS is one of the major obstacles, especially for developing countries. In this paper, we will assess techno-economic aspect of various carbon capture and storage technology in coal-fired power plants, including pre-combustion capture, post-combustion capture, oxy-combustion capture, as well as carbon storage. For various coal-fired power plants, integrated gasification combined cycle with pre-combustion capture has the highest potential to capture carbon dioxide with the lowest energy penalties and capital & operational costs, post-combustion capture can be retrofitted at relatively low cost to existing pulverized coal power plants and allows the combustion process to be kept relatively unchanged, and oxy-combustion capture is relatively immature at present. Although CCS has been accepted as clean development mechanism (CDM) project activities under the Kyoto Protocol, current carbon trading mechanism is inadequate to strongly promote investments on CCS facilities coupled to coal-fired power plants.