Techno-Economic Evaluations and Benchmarking of Pre-combustion CO₂ Capture and Oxy-fuel Processes Developed in the European ENCAP Project

ENCAP (ENhanced CAPture of CO₂) is a major technology development project under the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission, involving leading European power and energy industries and equipment suppliers, and high ranked research institutes and universities. The project aims at developing cost efficient pre-combustion CO₂ capture and oxy-fuel technologies for power generation based on fossil fuels, to substantially reduce the cost of CO₂ capture. The industries have established a set of defined baseline power plants without CO₂ capture for lignite, bituminous coal, pet-coke and natural gas, and boundaries for technical and economic analysis. Of several concepts for power plants with CO₂ capture, developed in ENCAP, the most promising have been evaluated, compared and benchmarked with respect to technical performance, costs and level of technical maturity versus needs for further R&D and technical risks. Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved