Techno-economic evaluation of different operating scenarios for indigenous and imported coal blends and biomass co-firing on supercritical coal fired power plant performance

Pakistan has enormous coal and biomass resources, however, it imports coal from other parts of the world. Whereas, utilization of indigenous coal and biomass may be beneficial for the economy and local energy security. Hence, this study focuses on the likely effects of using coal blends and biomass co-firing with indigenous and imported coal on the performance of a supercritical power plant. A coal fired power plant is modeled using Aspen plus. Three different case studies are considered, which are; constant heat input (CHI), constant fuel input (CFI), and constant Reynold number (CRN). Conclusively, coal blending has resulted in reduced emissions than the use of low rank coal. Further, biomass co-firing has shown reduced emissions. For the CHI case, efficiency remains the same for all fuels. The highest efficiency in the CFI case is for South African coal and the lowest is for biomass. In the CRN case, South African coal has maximum efficiency while Thar coal has the minimum efficiency. Moreover, economic analysis of this study proposes that native resources must be used, provided the technical issues have resolved. Therefore, this study resulted in the comparison and applicability of different coal blends and renewable biomass fuel in a coal fired power plant.