|
Monday, January 01, 2007 China's Coal FutureContinued from page 4 By Peter Fairley
Carbon Power While China's desire to end its dependence on foreign oil is helping to drive huge capital investments in liquefaction technology, the country's power producers are moving much more slowly to take advantage of coal gasification. What they, like their American counterparts, are missing is an incentive to upgrade from conventional pulverized-coal plants to the more expensive gasification plants. According to Li Wenhua, the former 863 program manager (who now directs gasification research in China for General Electric), Chinese industrialists perceive pulverized-coal plants as a license to print money. "People say you shouldn't call it a power plant; it's a money-making machine," says Li. As yet, no power company has been willing to be the first to hit the off switch. Ironically, China's move to a more open economy has hampered efforts to deploy more innovative technologies. In the 1990s, it looked as if China's power sector was headed for its own gasification revolution. In 1993, China's leading power engineering firm, China Power Engineering Consulting in Beijing, began designing the country's first gasification power plant. The monopoly utility of the era, the State Power Corporation, planned to build the commercial-scale plant in Yantai, a thriving seaport not far from the Bohai Sea. The Yantai plant was to be the beginning of a transition to cleaner coal technology, says Zhao Jie, the plant's designer, now vice president of China Power Engineering. "China wanted to take a cleaner and more efficient way to produce power," says Zhao. Instead, the demonstration plant she designed went on a roller-coaster ride to nowhere. Design work was temporarily halted in 1994 when the cost of the technology was deemed unacceptably high, revived in the late 1990s, and then cut adrift after 2002 by the breakup of the State Power Corporation. The Yantai power plant was based on integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology. IGCC plants resemble natural-gas-fired power plants--they use two turbines to capture mechanical and heat energy from expanding combustion gases--but are fueled with syngas from an integrated coal gasification plant. They're not emissions free, but their gas streams are more concentrated, so the sulfurous soot, carbon dioxide, and other pollutants they generate are easier to separate and capture. Of course, once the carbon dioxide--the main greenhouse gas--is captured, engineers still need to find a place to stow it. The most promising strategy is to sequester it deep within saline aquifers and oil reservoirs. In preliminary analyses, Chinese geologists have estimated that aging oil fields and aquifers could absorb more than a trillion tons of carbon dioxide--more than China's coal-fired plants would emit, at their current rate, for hundreds of years. The Huaneng Group, a power producer based in Beijing, has pulled together a consortium of power and coal interests (Shenhua included) called GreenGen to build the first Chinese IGCC demo plant by 2010; like the related FutureGen project organized by the U.S. Department of Energy, GreenGen is to start with power production, then add carbon capture and storage. China's vice premier, Zeng Peiyan, made an appearance at GreenGen's ceremonial debut last summer, indicating Beijing's support for the project. |
Audio »
Share »
Digg this
Add to del.icio.us
Add to Reddit
Add to Facebook
Slashdot It!
Stumble It!
Add to Newsvine
Add to Connotea
Add to CiteUlike
Add to Furl
Googlize this
Add to Rojo
Add to MyWeb
Favorite
Print
E-mail
Measuring Asia's Pollution Exports
03/26/2008
Comments
Krakhan on 01/16/2007 at 3:25 PM
1
Has anyone thought to begin by creating c-o-2 "band-aids" on these plants?
By this I mean a "dry-ice" or CO2 extracter-plant next to the powerplant. The dryice can be buried in old mines or shipped to other factories for other uses.
On a similar basis, we have the technology to add particulate removal systems to the various other Chinese industries to remove the smoke and smog polluntants from the Atmosphere before they fully leave the smoke stacks.
Just a thought. Something along the idea of doing applying intermediate fixes while the final big fix is developed.
jack_ryan on 01/19/2007 at 7:17 PM
1
maybe somewhat off-topic, but just for clarification: the magnetically levitated train is the Transrapid, built by Thyssen-Krupp and Siemens.
While the basic technology was patented in 1933 by Herrmann Kemper, a small-scale version of the train had its maiden trip in 1971, at a time when Chinese were still waving Mao's red bible.
By continuous, cooperative research at Thyssen and Univ. Braunschweig it got todays looks and capabilities.
Have a look here:
http://www.transrapid.de
http://www.thyssenkrupp-transrapid.de/
http://www.juergen-koerner.de/tr_gesch.htm
http://www.iabg.de/transrapid/technik/index_de.php
or Goooooooogle for it.
The Chinese can be hailed for building the first commercially
used 30 km tracks from Pudong airport to downtown Shanghai, while a test track stands here in Lathen, Germany for some 25 years now.
Regards
tb5036t on 01/21/2007 at 2:49 AM
2
The reality is that today's modern PC plants with BACT are as clean as IGCC, their efficiency is 40-45% in line with IGCC (yes, IGCC is a lot less efficient than 50-60%) and they are a lot more CO2 capture ready than IGCC. Post combustion CO2 capture in a PC plant is a tail end process requiring no major modifications to the plant while pre combustion CO2 capture IGCC is a costly proposition requiring major changes to the plant including adding shift reactor and switching to hydrogen turbine that does not even exist. The reality is also that IGCC costs a lot more than 15-25% more than PC and, bringing it to par with PC in terms of reliability and availability, costs a lot more.
The simple but painful solution to global warming is a high tax on CO2 emissions from all sources. Higher cost will drive all of us to use energy more efficiently, to use less CO2 intensive energy sources and to develop and apply better CO2 capture technologies including to PC boilers.
suBWKEURRWE on 02/03/2007 at 2:07 PM
2
RayPhoenix on 03/14/2007 at 2:07 AM
1