ThermoEnergy Corporation (OTCBB:TMEN - News) has received a $310,000 DOE funded project to develop compact zero air emission power plants for medium to heavy industry. Commonly referred to as Combined Heat & Power (CHP) plants, these systems would allow main-stream industries to switch from natural gas to lower priced alternative fuels to supply their energy needs while reducing emissions and capturing carbon dioxide (CO2). Switching fuel sources could allow companies to save hundreds of millions of dollars in energy costs, keep their US based plants operating, and lessen dependence on imported energy resources.
These plants will be based on ThermoEnergy's advanced patented zero air emission power plant design known as ThermoEnergy Integrated Power Systems (TIPS). TIPS eliminates the atmospheric emissions of NOx, SOx, mercury, and particulates from power plants that run on coal, oil, natural gas or biomass. In addition, TIPS captures and recovers CO2 in pressurized liquid form for sequestration or beneficial reuse.
Currently, most heavy industry in the US relies on fossil fuel, in the form of natural gas, to supply its energy needs - a commodity that has gone up almost 600% in the past five years. A significant percentage of these facilities are situated in 'Non Attainment' areas; areas where the local air quality does not meet minimum US EPA clean air standards. In order to change fuel sources, the new source must be as clean as or cleaner than natural gas. Currently no conventional power plant design in the 50Mw to 100Mw range will allow them to make such a switch.
Based on reliable oxy-fuel chemistry (oxygen rather than air is used to combust a fuel, resulting in a highly pure carbon dioxide (CO2) exhaust that can be captured at relatively low-cost) TIPS combines the combustion of carbonaceous fuels with essentially complete recovery of all by-products including acid gases, mercury, particulates and CO2, at efficiencies comparable to those of conventional large-scale combustion technologies.
TIPS departs from the traditional oxy-fuel approach by pressurizing the entire combustion system. This increased system pressure enables the use of gas-to-liquid steam-hydroscrubbing to collect and remove priority and toxic pollutants including NOx, SOx, mercury, particulates and CO2. These pollutants are then recovered via direct condensation and can be sold as commodity products.
TIPS enjoys numerous economic and environmental advantages when compared to conventional "clean coal" combustion technologies, such as the Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) process. TIPS is a straight-forward approach to power generation containing fewer unit operations and thus is intrinsically more reliable. When using high rank coal, TIPS and IGCC are similar in economics for a new large utility plants (excluding CO2 capture). Projections indicate TIPS to be far superior economically for all other cases, and with CO2 capture as an added condition, ThermoEnergy claims IGCC cannot match TIPS economic performance in any category.
The following process description and discussion of process economics are taken from the third resource:
TIPS process's combustion takes place at pressures between 4.83 and 8.96 MPa. (700 and 1300 psia) Increasing the pressure of combustion shifts the temperature at which water, CO2, mercury and acid gases condense. The elevated pressure and condensation temperature process conditions enable TIPS to utilize heat transfer, mass transfer and liquid equilibrium regimes well suited to capture of pollutants and CO2. Elevating the pressure enables TIPS to use the phenomenon of nucleate condensation at temperatures in the range of 262 to 303oC (503 to 577oF) in a heat exchanger that simultaneously recovers heat and condenses and captures pollutants. Two components of pressurized oxy-fuel technology central to achieving the twin goals of efficiency and pollution control are the are separation plant to provide oxygen under pressure, and the condensing heat exchanger to capture both pollutants and heat from the combustion gases. (see pages 2 and 3 of the third resource for a further description of the process) ....
The single largest parasitic loss for both IGCC and TIPS is the air separation unit. ... Since TIPS uses substantially more oxygen than IGCC, the parasitic load to generate this oxygen is commensurately higher and this is reflected in the the in-plant energy use. ... (TIPS has less steps than IGCC and) the small losses in each step of the IGCC add up. ... The advantage for TIPS when compared to IGCC lies in its simplicity and lower capital and operating costs. TIPS does not require costly catalysts and does not need sulfided activated carbon sorption for mercury capture. The ash and/or slag from TIPS will be fully combusted and retain little or no carbon and will be suitable for use in cement manufacture.
Emerging ion-transport membrane (ITM) technology is poised to revolutionize oxygen separation. ... DOE and major air separation companies estimate that capital and energy costs for oxygen separation plants will be reduced by roughly 35% compared to the traditional processes. Since TIPS uses substantially more oxygen than IGCC, the relative effect of ITM technology on the economics and performance of TIPS plants will be significant.
With improved air seperation capital and energy costs the total Capital expenditures for the two processes are changed from approximately equal to over 30% less for TIPS while the overall efficiency changes from a ~ 5% advantage for IGCC to ~ 3% advantage for TIPS.
Resources:
The US DOE Provides $310,000 Grant to ThermoEnergy to Begin Development of Zero-Air-emission Industrial Power Plants, Press release, Jan. 17, 2006
ThermoEnergy Corporation, Little Rock, AR
Pressurized Oxy-Fuel Combustion for Multi-Pollutant Capture, Alex G. Fasbender, ThearmoEnergy Corp.
Technorati tags: electric generation, emissions, pollution control, energy, technology
This sounds like the exact thing that the FutureGen program is intended to subsidize. Do these people have many Republican connections?
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