Water Usage and Loss Analysis of Bituminous Coal Fired Power Plants with CO₂ Capture (5 volumes)

Technical Review

1 March 2011

Andy Brown,, David Steen, Des Dillon, Ed Rubin, Evangelow Tzimas, Haibo Zhai, Jinying Yan, John Davison, John Wheeldon, Karl Bindemann, Konstantinos Vatopoulos, Marie Angeden, Mike Haines, Vince White

Citation: IEAGHG, "Water Usage and Loss Analysis of Bituminous Coal Fired Power Plants with CO₂ Capture (5 volumes)", 2010-05, March 2011.

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Publication Overview

IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme (IEA GHG) retained Foster Wheeler to investigate and evaluate water usage and loss of power in power plants with CO₂ capture. The work is developed thought the establishment of a rigorous accounting of water usage throughout the power plant in order to establish an acceptable methodology that can be used to compare water usage in power plants with and without CO₂ capture. This can provide a baseline set of cases and water loss data for assessing potential improvements and evaluating R&D programs.The purposes of the study, therefore, include:

A review and assessment of the available information of water usage from power plants such as PC, IGCC and NGCC with or without CO₂ capture from various previous studies done for IEA GHG, based on oxyfuel, pre- or post combustion CO₂ capture technologies.
A review and assessment of the available technologies that would allow reduction of water usage from power plants;
An evaluation and assessment of the applicable technologies for power plants with CO₂ capture in areas where water supplies could be severely limited.

Publication Summary

Power plants normally require substantial quantities water: raw process water, e.g. for boiler feed water make-up and flue gas scrubbing, and cooling water to dissipate low temperature heat principally from the steam turbine condenser.
Adding CO₂ capture significantly increases the water requirements of power plants but techniques can be used to reduce the water requirement to zero (pulverised coal plants) or close to zero (IGCC) if required. Water requirement is therefore not expected to be a constraint on the adoption of CO₂ capture technology.
The main techniques that could be used to reduce the water requirement would be air cooling to eliminate the need for cooling water, and modified waste water treatment and flue gas condensation to eliminate the need for raw process water.
Fully applying these water reduction techniques would reduce the thermal efficiency by 1.9-2.3 percentage points for plants without CO₂ capture and 2.2-2.7 percentage points for plants with CO₂ capture, compared to base line plants with once-through water cooling. The main reason for the efficiency reduction is the impact of using air cooling on the efficiency of the steam turbine. The efficiency penalties would be lower if plants with wet cooling towers were the base line plants.
Fully applying these water reduction techniques would increase the cost of electricity by 8-12% for plants without CO₂ capture and 12-13% for plants with CO₂ capture, compared to base line plants with once-through water cooling. The higher cost for water reduction in plants with capture is unlikely to be a significant additional deterrent to adoption of CCS.

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