I am grateful to Philippe Joubert and the good people of Alstom for the graph below, showing something which may not be widely appreciated: the average efficiency of coal fired power stations in China is now greater than that of those in Europe and North America. This is of course explained by the fact that the Chinese have been closing down old and inefficient coal-fired units (with efficiencies as low as 12%) and constructing new supercritical plants at an astonishing rate in recent years (accounting for 70 of the cohort of 172 supercritical plants with commissioning dates between 1998 and 2014, according to data presented by Alexander Leyzerovich elsewhere in this issue, see pp 31-39).
So if you want to know how to construct and operate supercritical pulverised coal fired power plants, China is increasingly the place to go (albeit without CCS, or even CCS readiness yet, but that’s only a matter of time, as they seem to have the geology, a topic to be covered in next month’s issue).
Similarly in coal gasification, as touched on in last month’s column, China, building on its long history of involvement in this area, is hosting a number of very innovative projects, notably the first planned full scale demonstration of the Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne compact gasification concept and the IGCC-based Greengen project.
GE has also recently announced – as part of the US–China clean energy co-operation agreements recently signed in Beijing by Barack Obama and Hu Jintao, referring to what they called “21st century coal” – that it plans to form a coal gasification joint venture with Shenhua, perhaps the largest coal company in the world. Key aims of this partnership will be to “improve the cost and performance” of commercial scale gasification and IGCC plants through scale up and use of advanced technologies such as GE’s new larger scale quench gasifier and higher pressure gasification system. In parallel the US Trade and Development Agency has announced it will provide grant funding for an “IGCC power station study that will establish the configuration and design parameters” for a new facility in China.
A particular focus of the GE/Shenhua joint venture will be “the deployment of commercial scale IGCC plants with carbon capture” – and, indeed, if Shenhua wants to realise its ambitions of becoming a respected multinational force in the energy business it will need to fully embrace CCS.
Knowing of China’s onerous technology transfer requirements it is not too difficult to imagine where the world might be buying its clean coal technology from in the not too distant future.
...and modularised nuclear new build
The Chinese are proving no slouches either when it comes to building nuclear power plants and becoming the masters of that technology.
They have recently announced that they are pushing ahead with AP1000 reactors on three new sites and they will be the first to be developed following technology transfer from Toshiba-owned Westinghouse.
Four AP1000s are already under construction, two each at Sanmen and Haiyang. And for future development China seems to be focusing on the AP1000 (rather than the EPR) and the CPR-1000 an indigenised version of the 900 MWe units imported in the 1980s. Installed capacity goals of 60 GWe by 2020 and 120-160 GWe by 2030 are being talked about (compared with a mere 9 GW in operation today).
A very interesting aspect of these AP1000 projects will be the speed of construction. A remarkable 36 months from first concrete to fuel loading has been claimed for the AP1000, in large part because of the very high degree of modularisation, with much parallel working and “open top” techniques (involving very heavy lifts). This contrasts with the EPR, which does not seem highly modularised by modern standards, and indeed is characterised as “stick built” by the construction community.
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