A novel calcium looping-integrated NGCC power plant configuration for carbon capture and utilization-Comprehensive performance analysis

Energy plays a pivotal role in industrial development of any country. At present, most of the countries are utilizing fossil fuels, mainly coal and natural gas as energy sources for power production. However, these sources emit high amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere resulting in global warming. Hence, the fossil fuel-based thermal power plants need to be integrated with CO2 sequestration and utilization processes for sustainable power production. In this work, four natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plant configurations are proposed-two with CO2 capture and sequestration (single and double calcium looping units) and two with CO2 capture and utilization (for production of dimethyl ether). Energy, exergy, environmental, and economic analyses are carried out to assess the performance of the proposed novel configurations against the conventional NGCC power plant. These analyses reveal that the NGCC power plant integrated with double calcium looping unit captures 91.32% of CO2 with an energy penalty of 6.73%. The proposed CO2 capture and utilization integrated configurations have low electrical power output; however, the conversion of CO2 to high energy density dimethyl ether (DME) product resulted in overall energy and exergy efficiency gain. The CO2 capture and utilization configuration integrated with solar energy is able to convert the total captured CO2 to DME and makes the process sustainable.