(564d) Techno-Economic Assessment of Hydrogen Production from Parallel Design Configuration of Fossil Fuel Derived Syngas Generation Processes

With an increase in the industrialization and population in the last few decades, not only the gap between energy demand and supply has increased but also the CO₂ emissions hit the highest levels. To control the greenhouse gas emissions, the improvement in the power generation processes to produce clean energy with CO₂ control technologies are getting more and more attention. Integrated coal gasification and combined cycle (IGCC) processes is a pre-combustion carbon capture technology that represents higher process efficiencies with the large scale implementation of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) systems. In this study, coal based gasification systems utilizing the low/high quality coals have been coupled with the reforming technologies in the parallel design configuration followed by the sequential heat integration between the two processes. This integration not only provides the necessary heat from the gasification unit to the reforming unit but also increase the H₂/CO ratio of the syngas. The syngas can be directly burned in the combined cycle unit or converted into the H₂ gas which itself can be marketed as a clean fuel. The techno-economic analysis have been also performed to analyze the energy and cost required for producing syngas and H₂ from the standalone IGCC and reforming technologies and the results are compared with the newly developed design for the various syngas compositions. The results showed that the new design has potential to boost up the syngas/H₂ production capacities and also reduces the CO₂ emissions for unit amount of H₂ production. Furthermore, the co-gasification of coal and biomass in the new design also showed the potential to reduce the overall carbon foot print.