Coal

Summary

Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is a type of fossil fuel, formed when dead plant matter decays into peat and is converted into coal by the heat and pressure of deep burial over millions of years. Vast deposits of coal originate in former wetlands called coal forests that covered much of the Earth's tropical land areas during the late Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) and Permian times. Many significant coal deposits are younger than this and originate from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. Coal is used primarily as a fuel. While coal has been known and used for thousands of years, its usage was limited until the Industrial Revolution. With the invention of the steam engine, coal consumption increased. In 2020, coal supplied about a quarter of the world's primary energy and over a third of its electricity.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal

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Energy demand continuously increases what contributes to higher emissions of GHG. Moreover, the primary energy sources like coal, natural gas and oil are depleting. To manage this problem, the scientists have worked on the different possibilities of renewable energy conversion technologies in order to get the most useful and cleanest type of energy. In this work, there are investigated possible biomass conversion technologies in order to satisfy energy demand for Poznan, the city in Poland. Actually, the energy demand is met by coal combined with heat and power plant (CHP). There is an interest of changing actual coal CHP plant with biomass to minimize emissions. The aim of this work is to choose the best thermo-chemical biomass conversion option in the concept of minimum investment cost. To achieve this goal, the thermo-economic analysis and optimization of different biomass conversion technologies have to be conducted. First, on the basis of the literature review, the models of biomass conversion processes are modeled in Belsim Vali software. Then, from 2008, two different scenarios of energy demand are defined for the city. In the next step of this work, there is conducted energy integration in order to find an optimal set of designed boundary conditions through maximizing the units of performance for the most promising types of biomass conversion processes. Finally, an optimal configurations and sizes of the equipments are found by thermo- economic optimization.

2011

Cutting the cost of carbon capture: a case for carbon capture and utilization

Johanna Maria Huck, Lennart Joos, Berend Smit

A significant part of the cost for carbon capture and storage ( CCS) is related to the compression of captured CO2 to its supercritical state, at 150 bar and typically 99% purity. These stringent conditions may however not always be necessary for specific cases of carbon capture and utilization ( CCU). In this manuscript, we investigate how much the parasitic energy of an adsorbent-based carbon capture process may be lowered by utilizing CO2 at 1 bar and adapting the final purity requirement for CO2 from 99% to 70% or 50%. We compare different CO2 sources: the flue gases of coal-fired or natural gas-fired power plants and ambient air. We evaluate the carbon capture performance of over 60 nanoporous materials and determine the influence of the initial and final CO2 purity on the parasitic energy of the carbon capture process. Moreover, we demonstrate the underlying principles of the parasitic energy minimization in more detail using the commercially available NaX zeolite. Finally, the calculated utilization cost of CO2 is compared with the reported prices for CO2 and published costs for CCS.

Royal Soc Chemistry2016

Thermo-economic evaluation of coal power plants with CO2 capture

Jeremy Urech

Actually the world is facing the dual challenge of energy supply security and mitigating climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions. In this context different alternatives to reduce the atmospheric CO2 emissions are increasing the efficiency, switching to renewable resource and reduce emissions from fossil resources by CO2 capture and storage (CCS) . In power plants three different CCS concepts have emerged: post-combustion applying an end of pipe technology to remove CO2, oxy-fuel combustion (i.e. pure O2 oxidation) and pre-combustion (i.e. H2 routes). Coal power plants are supplying a large amount of the world's electricity and contributing to the CO2 emissions increase. The goal of the project is to study the performance of coal power with CO2 capture and to assess the energy penalty and cost of capturing CO2.

2011