abstract
- The petroleum coke gasification integrated gasification combined cycle power plant (petcoke-IGCC) is a promising avenue for disposal of the ever-growing amount of stockpiled petroleum coke. In this work, we present a novel techno-economic and life cycle assessment of the process operated with carbon capture and sequestration. The proposed petcoke-to-electricity plant is designed and simulated in Aspen Plus v10. The proposed power plant was compared against coal integrated gasification combined cycle (coal-IGCC) and supercritical pulverized coal power plants operated with carbon capture and sequestration. The results showed that although the efficiency of the coal-IGCC plant is higher than the petcoke-IGCC plant, the higher energy density of the petcoke and lower resource costs were such that the levelized cost of electricity of petcoke-IGCC was lower than coal-IGCC. Furthermore, the feed flow rate of petcoke to the petcoke-IGCC process is approximately 15% lower than the coal feed rate to coal-IGCC in order to produce the same net electric power. In addition, the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel depletion of the petroleum coke integrated gasification combined cycle power were around 43% and 45% lower than the supercritical pulverized coal power plants respectively. Overall, the proposed petcoke-IGCC power plant showed to be a feasible avenue by which an environmentally safe “end of life” of petroleum coke can be achieved.