Conference Dates

April 10-14, 2016

Abstract

The Allam Cycle is a highly-recuperated oxy-fuel supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle that offers significant advantages over traditional power cycles, including high efficiencies, low capital costs, low or no water consumption, and elimination of all air emissions, including CO2. Traditional power cycles, such as natural gas combined cycle, supercritical coal cycles, and integrated gasification combined cycle, all require the addition of expensive, efficiency-reducing equipment in order to decrease and capture emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. The Allam Cycle takes a novel approach to reducing emissions from fossil fuel power generation, whereby the system uses oxy-combustion of fossil fuels and high-pressure supercritical CO2 as the working fluid in a highly recuperated cycle. In this configuration, the only by-products are liquid water and a stream of high-purity CO2 that is already at pipeline pressure as a result of the operating conditions of the cycle, thereby avoiding the additional capture, clean-up, and compression of previous systems. The cycle is able to utilize a variety of hydrocarbon fuels, including natural gas, unprocessed raw and sour gas, and gasified solid fuels such as coal or biomass. The result is a power cycle with major advantages over conventional systems that do not capture CO2, attaining comparable efficiencies to best-in-class natural gas power plants, currently reaching 59% LHV; significantly higher efficiencies than state-of-the-art coal plants, currently reaching 52% LHV; low capital costs due to the simplicity and high-pressure of the cycle; reduced or no water consumption and virtually no air emissions, including full CO2 capture. In Q1 2016, NET Power, working with CB&I, Exelon Corporation, 8 Rivers Capital, and Toshiba Corporation, brought the cycle to the demonstration phase by beginning construction on a 50 MWt natural gas-fired Allam Cycle demonstration plant outside of Houston, Texas. The 50 MWt Allam Cycle demonstration plant in Texas will be a fully operational, grid-connected power plant containing all key system components. It will demonstrate the full operability of the cycle, including start-up, shut-down, ramping, and partial-load operation. Commissioning will be nearly complete by Q1 2017. In tandem with the construction effort, significant progress has been made on the detailed system design, component-level testing, and the control system, which is in the process of finalization using a detailed plant-wide simulator. This presentation provides an update on the status of the technology including a discussion of the engineering and construction progress of the demonstration plant and the development status and schedule for the first 295MWe, commercial-scale NET Power plants.

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