Transition Engineering Towards Carbon Capture In Natural Gas Combined Cycles With Exhaust Gas Recycling (TECC-GAS)

As Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) becomes the accepted norm for new coal plants it seems likely that Natural Gas Combined Cycle (NGCC) plants will also face pressure to implement CCS. CO2 emissions of unabated natural gas plants are of the order of 300-400gCO2/kWh. In the context of the UK commitment to reduce their CO2 emissions, the Committee on Climate Change suggests that electricity generation should be largely decarbonised, down to 100gCO2/kWh by 2030 and 50gCO2/kWh by 2050. It is thus critical that NGCC plants are also fitted with CCS to enable the continued use of natural gas, but with substantially reduced CO2 emissions.

The project seeks to move beyond current concepts for making natural gas fired plants capture-ready and for subsequent transitioning to CO2 capture that assume base-load operation with capture, unchanging technology throughout the plant’s economic lifetime and simple integration concepts.
It will examine engineering options for CO2 capture retrofit and new build in the context of a period of regulatory and technological changes for CCS, with strong links between industrial and academic engineers to assess the actual potential application of recent and planned academic work. It will pay particular attention to a novel concept where recycling of the carbon dioxide in the exhaust gas of the gas turbine is used as an operating strategy to reduce the size and the operating costs of downstream post-combustion capture systems. The engineering aspects will be examined in details to provide the underpinning engineering in advance of pilot scale development in the UK.

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Select the Research Area: "Materials & Processes" and clearly state on your application form which project you are applying for and the relevant supervisor.