Combustion vs. gasification for a demonstration CCS (carbon capture and storage) project in Italy: A techno-economic analysis

The need to reduce CO2 emissions requires a great economical effort to optimize the processes and solve the main technical and economic problems which still limit a large-scale diffusion of this kind of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. In this paper, the main results of a techno-economic comparison between ultra supercritical pulverized coal combustion (USC) and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants are presented. The Sulcis coal basin, considered as a reference location for the plant configurations here analysed, could represent a very important site to test carbon capture and storage technologies, being representative of a lot of potential storage site in the world. For both USC and IGCC technologies, three different configurations have been compared: a configuration without CCS, a CO2-free configuration and an intermediate solution in which a demonstration CCS system is applied to only a portion of produced gas. The analysis here presented shows that USC technology is slightly more profitable than IGCC if a configuration without CCS is considered, whereas IGCC is more profitable than USC for a CO2-free configuration. Due to the high CCS costs and to the specificity of the site, the investment is not profitable if not supported by an adequate incentive. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.