A few green shoots for IGCC?

15 May 2009


E ven in these straitened times there are, amazingly, still a few green shoots in the IGCC field. The Koreans, for example, have recently placed a FEED (front-end engineering and design) contract with Foster Wheeler for a planned IGCC plant at Taean – Korea’s first – to be owned and operated by state-owned Korea Western Power Co. The contract was placed by Doosan, gasification island EPC contractor for the plant, which will use Shell technology.

In the USA Tenaska has retained Kiewit Energy and Burns & McDonnell to conduct a FEED study for its proposed IGCC at Taylorville – which Tenaska hopes will be one of the USA’s “first commercial-scale, coal-gasification-with-carbon-capture plants.”

In Poland utility PKE and chemical company ZAK seem to pressing ahead, at least for the moment, with their proposed IGCC+CCS project at Kedzierzyn, while in Germany RWE still says it intends to build a lignite fuelled 450 MWe IGCC+CCS scheme at Huerth/Goldenburg near Cologne with CO2 storage in north east Germany (via a somewhat ambitious 530 km pipeline). RWE sees its WTA lignite pre-drying technology as indispensable to its lignite IGCC flow scheme and in February inaugurated the WTA prototype plant at the Niederaussem Coal Innovation Centre.

But it is in the UK where proponents of IGCC have enjoyed their biggest boost for many years, with the government’s momentous recent announcements on mandatory carbon capture for new coal (see this month’s news) and on finding a funding mechanism to support new CCS demonstration projects, including IGCC+CCS (a juxtaposition of acronyms that may become increasingly commonplace over the next few years). The mechanism, yet to be worked out, could be based on a fixed price for carbon abated or might be in the form of a feed-in tariff (which has worked so well in Germany to promote renewables), perhaps amounting to a 2% levy on electricity bills.

The idea of the new funding mechanism is to allow support of three new demo projects, in addition to the post-combustion demonstration that should emerge at some stage from the existing “CCS competition” (to which £90 million of public funding has been allocated, allowing the exercise to move to the next phase, selection of bids to take to detailed engineering and design). The CCS competition was restricted to post-combustion only, on the grounds that this would produce a technology retrofittable to the existing coal fleet, in particular in places like China.

But the British government now says – and this represents a significant shift in the right direction – it wants the three new demo projects to be a “mix of pre- and post-combustion.”

This must have been very good news for the UK’s long time IGCC+CCS stalwarts: Powerfuel, whose 900 MWe Hatfield project (which is the most advanced in terms of implementation and already has Section 36 approval) could be part of the suggested Humberside cluster of networked CO2 sources; and Progressive Energy/Centrica, whose Eston Grange project would be linked into the proposed Teesside cluster.

IGCC of course has its ardent critics, who point to its cost and complexity, among other things. But there is some very interesting development work going on currently that promises to reduce the costs of future IGCC plants, not least in the field of ion transport membranes for oxygen production, which promises significant capital cost decrease combined with efficiency increase.

On the issue of complexity, it is sometimes argued that IGCC looks more like a chemical plant than a power station – but so would a PC plant equipped with the full panoply of post combustion scrubbing equipment and the upgraded flue gas cleaning equipment that will be needed upstream of it (see p 34).

When it comes to coal new build, pre-combustion capture (as in an IGCC+CCS scheme) has some inherent advantages. But it needs demonstration and will greatly benefit from learning by doing. So it is entirely appropriate that it should receive funding in the UK as part of a portfolio of CCS demo projects.

James Varley is group managing editor, Modern Power Systems




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