Calcium looping with supercritical CO₂ cycle for decarbonisation of coal-fired power plant

State-of-the-art integration scenarios of calcium looping (CaL), which is an emerging CO₂ capture technology, assume that excess heat is used to raise steam for the steam cycle and result in a net efficiency penalty of 6.0-8.0% points. In this study, a concept using the supercritical CO₂ cycle (s-CO₂) instead of the conventional steam cycle is proposed. Retrofit of CaL with recompression s-CO₂ cycle to the 580 MW_el coal-fired power plant was found to result in a net efficiency penalty of 6.9%_HHV points. This is 1%_HHV point lower than that for the same system linked with the steam cycle having the same turbine inlet conditions (593.3 °C/242.3 bar). A further reduction of the net efficiency penalty to 5.8%_HHV points was achieved through considering a pump instead of a first CO₂ compression stage and increasing the turbine inlet temperature to 620 °C and pressure to 300 bar. As the s-CO₂ cycle's specific capital cost is up to 27% lower than that of the equivalent steam cycle, CaL with s-CO₂ cycle is a viable option for the coal-fired power plant decarbonisation. Moreover, it can be expected that this cycle can be successfully implemented in other high-temperature looping cycles, such as chemical looping combustion.