Abstract
Environmental concerns caused by CO2 emissions has attracted much attention by researchers worldwide. CO2 can be captured from large single sources such as power plants to reduce the CO2 emission. Solvent-based post-combustion carbon capture (PCC) process for large scale biomass-fired power plant could achieve negative carbon emission. However, capture level is commonly set at 90% in many studies. The small fraction of residual CO2 is still a large amount due to the high flue gas flowrate. In this study, a piperazine-based PCC process at 95% capture level for biomass-fired power plant was studied. The process was simulated in Aspen Plus® V11, validated and scaled up. The energy performance results showed that when the capture level is increased to 95%, the reboiler duty rises to 4.07 GJ/tCO2, corresponding to an increase of approximately 13.7% compared to the 90% case. This additional regeneration energy demand is offset by the reduction in residual CO2 emissions from flue gas or 0.23 million tons extra CO2 captured each year (from 3.86 million tons CO2/year to 4.09 million tons CO2/year). It is feasible for improving negative emission performance in BECCS systems. More analysis (e.g. different configurations and economic analysis) will be performed to further discuss the high capture level process.