Energy-recuperative coal-integrated gasification/gas turbine power generation system

Coal-integrated gasification/gas turbine (CIG/GT) based power plants are well known for achieving electricity more efficient and at a lower cost than direct combustion based power plants. Since the gasification is an endothermic, thermochemical conversion process, it requires heat to proceed. In general, this heat is furnished by internal combustion taking place in the gasifier by virtue of oxygen-blown or air-blown gasification. However, the direct combustion of the solid fuel is seen to be inefficient because of the large amount of exergy destruction posed during the combustion, especially at relatively low temperatures like gasification temperatures. This causes the overall performance deterioration of the CIG/ GT system. Therefore, a decrease in the destruction of exergy during the combustion can contribute to improve overall system efficiency. In this paper, an innovative concept of energy-recuperative gasification was proposed and incorporated in the CIG/GT system. The idea is to make use of the waste heat from the gas turbine exhaust as the reaction heat for the gasification instead of the internal combustion. This type of energy recuperation is also called thermochemical recuperation. In addition, the proposed CIG/GT incorporates other effective energy recuperation, including heat and steam recuperation, in order to maximize the generation efficiency. The feasibility of the concept implementation and the system improvement were preliminarily examined and discussed.