Modification of combined cycle power plant to reduce CO2 footprint

Abstract: Worldwide concern on reducing global warming consequences has motivated the development of power generation technologies to move towards renewable and sustainable energy. The process takes time and currently, a significant percentage of the world’s electricity systems are driven by fossil fuels. The transition phase from fossil fuel to renewable technology has allowed the combined cycle gas power plant to play an essential role in our global energy mix. This investigation aims to develop scenarios to improve its performance and reduce the carbon footprint during its operation. A baseline scenario of the natural gas combined cycle has been developed using Aspen Hysys software, and the simulation performance is validated with ASME PTC 4-4. The analytical validation results in a 1.13% difference in air and fuel flow rate of 642.95 kg/s compared with 650.28 kg/s as simulation input. Four scenarios are developed following the baseline scenario: seawater cooling and intercooling with LNG cold energy utilization, carbon capture, and hydrogen blending. Those scenarios are compared with three key performance indicators such as system efficiency (%), levelized cost of electricity (USD/MWh), and specific carbon dioxide emissions (gr-CO2/kWh). The analysis shows that sea water cooling with LNG cold energy achieves the highest efficiency of 56.46%, a 0.12% increase compared with the baseline scenario. Hydrogen blending with natural gas achieves the lowest LCOE and specific carbon dioxide footprint of 46.97 USD/MWh and 351.23 gr-CO2/kWh, respectively. The reduction of 12.58 kTon annual carbon dioxide is achieved by implementing 5% hydrogen blending by volume into the combined cycle power generation system.