Economic assessment of novel amine based CO₂ capture technologies integrated in power plants based on European Benchmarking Task Force methodology

The objective of this paper is to assess the economic advantages of an innovative solvent for CO₂ capture on state-of-the-art solvents_. The CESAR-1 solvent, which is an aqueous solution of 2-amino-2-methyl-propanol (AMP) and piperazine (PZ), is applied both to advanced supercritical pulverised (ASC) coal and natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plants with post-combustion CO₂ capture units. The methodology includes process model developments using commercial simulation programs, which determine the thermodynamic properties of the selected power plants and the performance of the CO₂ capture units. The results show that the techno-economic benefit of CESAR-1 versus MEA is more significant for ASC than that for NGCC due to a higher concentration of CO₂ in the flue gas. This follows from the fact that the switch from MEA to CESAR-1 solvents reduces the electricity cost by 4.16€/MWh in the case of the ASC plant compared to 0.67€/MWh in connection with the proposed NGCC plant. Based on the above figures, we can conclude that CESAR-1 reduces the cost of CO₂ avoided compared to MEA by 6€/t CO₂ and 2€/t CO₂ for the selected ASC and NGCC plants respectively. In view of that, the techno-economics can be improved if the CO₂ capture plant is designed to operate using the CESAR-1 absorption technology due to a reduction in the regeneration energy and the solvent recirculation rate (considering its higher CO₂ net capacity). However, the variable costs of running the capture plant are higher for the CESAR-1 solvent due to the higher cost of the amines.