Identifying opportunities for synergetic integration of CO2 capture with a coal power plant

The chemical absorption CO2 capture technology is effective and ready for commercial application in the power plant. The major challenge of the technology is the huge amount of energy consumed by the CO2 capture plant. Research and development is being conducted to reduce this excessive energy consumption and one of the very promising strategies is the synergetic integration of CO2 capture with power plant. This integration essentially takes into consideration of making the most of use of energy in one process to another. Identifying these opportunities for further energy utilization demands precise energy analysis of the processes involved. Exergy analysis is very effective in this regard as it deals with the usable energy with reference to environment and is based on the second law of thermodynamics. In this research, a process simulation model is developed based on a power plant in Central Queensland, Australia along with a CO2 capture process. The exergy analysis is then performed to facilitate synergetic integration of the CO2 capture with the power plant through revealing usable energy lost.