Integration of gas switching combustion in a humid air turbine cycle for flexible power production from solid fuels with near‐zero emissions of CO₂ and other pollutants

This work presents a novel plant configuration for power production from solid fuels with integrated CO₂ capture. Specifically, the Gas Switching Combustion (GSC) system is integrated with a Humid Air Turbine (HAT) power cycle and a slurry fed entrained flow (GE‐Texaco) gasifier or a dry fed (Shell) gasifier with a partial water quench. The primary novelty of the proposed GSC‐HAT plant is that the reduction and oxidation reactor stages of the GSC operation can be decoupled allowing for flexible operation, with the oxygen carrier serving as a chemical and thermal energy storage medium. This can allow the air separation unit, gasifier, gas clean‐up, CO₂ compressors and downstream CO₂ transport and storage network to be downsized for operation under steady state conditions, while the reactors and the power cycle operate flexibly to follow load. Such cost‐effective flexibility will be highly valued in future energy systems with high shares of variable renewable energy. The GSC‐HAT plant achieves 42.5% electrical efficiency with 95.0% CO₂ capture rate with the Shell gasifier, and 41.6% efficiency and 99.2% CO₂ capture with the GE gasifier. An exergy analysis performed for the GE gasifier case revealed that this plant reached 38.9% exergy efficiency, only 1.6%‐points below an inflexible GSC‐IGCC benchmark configuration, while reaching around 5%‐points higher CO₂ capture rate. Near‐zero SOx and NO_x emissions are achieved through pre‐combustion gas clean‐up and flameless fuel combustion. Overall, this flexible and efficient near‐zero emission power plant appears to be a promising alternative in a future carbon constrained world with increasing shares of variable renewables and more stringent pollutant (NO_x, SOx) regulations.