Techno-Economic Analysis of Coal Direct Chemical Looping Combustion Using Aspen Plus

Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) is considered as one of the most efficient technologies for carbon capture from coal directed power plants. The effectiveness of CLC in terms of efficient power generation and almost pure CO₂ capture has been well documented; it has the least energy penalty among several other combustion technologies currently being considered for CO₂ capture, e.g. the oxy-combustion.  For CLC, the concept of using a multi-staged model has also been studied by the authors recently; the purpose of multi-staging is to increase the rate of fuel conversion in the char gasification step in CLC.  This increased rate of conversion supposedly would not only make the process faster, but would most likely also increase the energy output of the CLC system.  Although the benefits of CLC and multi-staged CLC in terms of efficiency and energy output have been well studied, the techno-economic analysis of a CLC based power plant has been scarce in the literature. In this paper, techno-economic analysis of a coal direct multi-stage CLC system is conducted using the software ASPEN Plus. The relative cost and benefit analysis of single-stage, two-stage and four-stage CLC system is performed.    The results of techno-economic simulations show that the coal direct chemical looping combustion (CD-CLC) can be an economically viable technology for power generation when compared to the traditional power plants.  The results also indicate that the two-stage system CLC is the most economically viable system among the single-, two- and four-stage CLC systems considering both the capital and the operating costs.