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Features. Plant Design: Accelerating the deployment of cleaner coal plants

Power, Feb 2008 by Parkes, Jack, Holt, Neville, Phillips, Jeffrey, Institute, Electric Power Research

face=+Italic; The dearth of commercial operating experience for advanced coal-fired facilities is forcing their early adopters and builders to use long development cycles and pay high costs for unique engineering design studies. A broad-based industry collaborative effort fostered by EPRI to address this issue is beginning to show results.face=-Italic;

By Jack Parkes, Neville Holt, and Jeffrey Phillips, Electric Power Research Institute

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In recent years, U.S. utilities have shown increasing interest in deploying new coal-fired power plants based on advanced technologies such as integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC), ultrasupercritical pulverized coal (USC PC) combustion, and supercritical fluidized bed combustion (SC FBC). The appeal of innovative and more-efficient coal plants continues to be driven by volatile natural gas prices, the need for new baseload generating capacity, ever-lower limits on plants' air pollution, and likely future restrictions on carbon dioxide (COface=+Subscript; 2face=-Subscript; ) emissions.

Yet deployers of advanced coal plants face considerable obstacles. Unlike natural gas-fired plants of the 1990s, which were inexpensive and could be built and permitted relatively quickly, advanced coal plants are challenged by high capital and construction costs, reliability shortfalls, long project schedules, and lengthy environmental permitting processes.

On a timeline of technology development (Figure 1), advanced coal-fired facilities are now nearing the crest of the curve, where commercial units must overcome high initial costs to reach technological maturity and the lowest achievable cost. If advanced coal plants are to succeed, the industry must get beyond the current penalties in cost and schedule that dog first-of-a-kind plants to achieve the shared economies of 'Nth-of-a-kind' plants.

A major contributor to this challenge has been a lack of experience with the new technology. For example, although more than 130 coal gasification plants are currently operating worldwide, only 16 can be considered IGCC plants, whose primary role is to produce electricity. Only four of those 16 plants are in the U.S.

A shortage of operating experience has not been the only hurdle on advanced coal plants' road to technological maturation and lower costs. Another is the fact that all of the advanced plants in commercial service today were conceived, designed, and built as custom projects. Standard design specifications are needed to lower initial capital costs, support repeatable and reliable performance, and reduce development time and cost for potential plant owners.

face=+Bold; CoalFleet for Tomorrowface=-Bold;

An EPRI-sponsored collaborative effort--called the CoalFleet for Tomorrow program--seeks to lower the hurdle of technology development by deploying the first group of full-scale advanced coal plants as quickly as possible. Launched in 2004, the program brings together a broad cross section of generating companies, turbine and boiler suppliers, engineering/procurement/construction (EPC) firms, and research partners from around the world. Today, more than 60 companies from five continents are active participants in the effort.

One of CoalFleet's key initiatives is a unique, circular, learn-by-doing process in which expert information is provided to utilities developing plant designs, and the utilities' experience is fed back into growing databases of information on advanced coal technologies.

The process works as follows. EPRI provides expert consultation to an 'early deployment project' (EDP) utility that has committed to design and build a new IGCC, USC PC, or SC FBC plant. For this consultation, EPRI enlists a large team of independent world-class experts to work with its own knowledgeable staff to advise the EDP utility on how to optimize the plant's design. In return for the expert advice, the utility shares nonproprietary information from its site-specific feasibility studies and front-end engineering designs (FEEDs) with the broader CoalFleet membership.

The expert consultations and the feedback from EDPs are creating a family of design guidelines and permitting data and guidance that are continually updated to reflect new information and lessons learned. It is estimated that participating in this process could cut the costs of feasibility and preliminary engineering studies by 30% to 50%, shorten a project's development cycle by up to two years, and reduce an advanced coal plant's capital costs by $100/kW to $200/kW or more.

face=+Bold; It takes a villageface=-Bold;

To date, the process has produced four types of documents and databases that are used both progressively and for feeding back lessons learned into their predecessor documents (Figure 2).

The first resource at the start of the process is the Advanced Coal Technology Knowledge Base, a web-based repository of information on trends in advanced coal technology design, cost, and performance. The core of the knowledge base is more than 50 design cases from eight state-of-the-art studies conducted by EPRI, the DOE, utilities, consultants, and teams of technology suppliers. Each case study details vital characteristics in up to 450 defined fields. CoalFleet adds data as they become available from new feasibility studies by members and from design decisions made by companies undertaking early deployment projects. The Knowledge Base also includes papers from key conferences and lessons learned from demonstration units.

Energy Industry

Features. Plant Design: Accelerating the deployment of cleaner coal plants

Power, Feb 2008 by Parkes, Jack, Holt, Neville, Phillips, Jeffrey, Institute, Electric Power Research

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