Technoeconomic assessment of China’s indirect coal liquefaction projects with different CO2 capture alternatives

Wenji Zhou, Bing Zhu, Dingjiang Chen, Fangxian Zhao and Weiyang Fei

Energy, 2011, vol. 36, issue 11, 6559-6566

Abstract: ICL (Indirect coal liquefaction), an alternative fuel-supplying technology, has drawn much attention and caused considerable debate in China’s energy sector. The hurdles to its development include the high risk of investment into large-scale installations, the high CO2 emissions and water resource consumption. A comprehensive assessment of ICL is urgently needed. This study provides an economic assessment and a technical analysis based on process simulations. To address the future challenge of curbing CO2 emissions, three absorption methods are compared for capturing the CO2 released from the ICL process: DMC (a novel absorbent), MEA and Rectisol. The comparative results suggest that physical absorbents, represented by Rectisol and DMC, have a remarkable advantage over chemical absorption processes, represented by MEA. The Rectisol process costs the least, while the DMC process is close to the same level. As a novel absorbent, DMC has the potential to be widely used in the future. The economic analysis of ICL predicted a high capital cost of over 35 billion yuan and an overall product cost of approximately 3800 yuan/ton for the baseline. In addition, via a sensitivity analysis, coal price, electricity price and capacity factor were identified as the three most influential factors affecting the overall product cost.

Keywords: ICL (Indirect coal liquefaction); CO2 capture; Technoeconomic assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:36:y:2011:i:11:p:6559-6566

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2011.09.007

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