Zero Emission Power Plants Coming Next Year

a reply to: ErosA433

Yes, superconducting material is used in the stack. And as
a regenerating power source the hope is that it will replace
the power plants with a large enough fuel cell.

Estimated fuel cell power demands in 2020 is 50GW.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF


Finally! A decent update!

OP was December 2016 announcing a power pant in La Porte, Texas, that was going to use a power generation scheme called, the Allam cycle, after its creator, Rodney Allam.

It is a bit complicated. Natural gas is injected into a chamber where pure oxygen is added (I later found out that it is concentrated from atmospheric oxygen), the mixture is ignited creating CO2, H2O, and heat. That mixture is sent around to do a lap while another mixture is fired up in the combustion chamber. The CO2 from the first round is introduced to the second round. That heavy concentrated CO2 is sent to another concentrator, H2O removed, and heated resulting in a supercritical carbon dioxide, SCO2, which is sent off to turn a turbine made specifically to use SCO2 as a "working fluid" instead of steam. The loop is closed and they can use the CO2 as much as they want until it is sent off to a storage tank.

The SCO2 turbine is smaller than a traditional turbine. It has fewer parts. It does not corrode as quickly. They are not introducing nitrogen into the combustion chamber so no NOx pollutants are created. They get electricity out of the turbine. They have to clean the H2O out of the SCO2 which is so pure they have been approval to dump it directly into the stream behind the plant!

Most importantly, they do not dump the CO2 they created into the atmosphere. It is captured and remains so. It sounds hypocritical but they sell it to oil producers to extract more oil (EOR) but the oil companies keep it underground after they use it. Yes, technically, they are creating emissions but compared to how a coal plant works... night and day!

They achieved "first fire" in May 2018. Then I have not heard anything until today.

The Texas plant, which first fired up in May, can produce 25 megawatts, enough to power all the homes in a medium-size town simultaneously. It isn't yet sending electricity to the local grid; Brown hopes that will happen within the next several months, once the plant completes an extensive series of tests and gets connected with Texas utility company Ercot.

Meanwhile, the company is looking to partner with an energy company on its first full-size plant, which will be capable of producing 12 times as much energy. Net Power's goal is to complete that project by 2022.

The Texas plant cost $150 million to build, and Brown says the price of running it will be on par with that of a conventional power plant--clearly, a critical factor for wide adoption. The goal is to go even further.

"We've got to make it cheaper than polluting systems," Brown says. "Here in the U.S., we tend to think that if we can afford it, then the system works. But that's not good enough. We've got to make it so cheap that China and India will choose it, and developing nations will be able to afford it."

It's an ambitious goal, but a worthwhile one. Electricity generation is the cause of about 40 percent of the world's annual greenhouse gas emissions. The world's total emissions rose in 2018, even as scientists point to the dire need to reverse the trend immediately.

inc.com, March 11, 2019 - A $150 Million Power Plant Was Just Built in Texas. Humanity Should Pray It Succeeds.

NET Power is still running tests but they are already eyeing the future with a full sized plant by 2022. They are not on the grid but that is future planning for this year as well.

I would like to hear from them directly (power generation article, IEEE Spectrum, PR, etc) to see some numbers like how much CO2 has been generated, how efficient the turbine is, etc.

It may have taken a while but everything that is brand new at this scale has to take time for safety, environment, operational knowledge, etc. Not to mention selling the CO2 to customers that will use it properly.

Geeky, turbine update!

Power magazine has an article up about NET Power's Demo plant. Finally, at the end of the article do the talk about what Toshiba power had to go through to deliver the combustor and turbine (which is where get specs on what they designed both for)...

According to Toshiba’s engineers, the solution combined the company’s gas turbine and steam turbine technology. “Regarding gas turbines, Toshiba has technologies for air-cooled nozzles and blades and, also, combustion in the air with a pressure of around 2 MPa [megapascal] and a temperature up to 1,500C. Regarding steam turbines, Toshiba has developed and commercialized USC [ultrasupercritical] steam turbines in [the 1990s], and are now developing advanced USC (A-USC ) steam turbines. Their conditions are around 24 MPa and 600C for USC and around 31 MPa and 700C for A-USC,” it said.

The engineering challenges were hefty. The system’s “inlet pressure is 30 MPa, which is much higher than those of current commercialized gas turbines. And the inlet temperature is 1,150C, which is much higher than those of commercialized [USC] steam turbines and is the same level as those of so-called E-class gas turbines,” the company said.

First, the engineers applied a double-shelled structure for the turbine and combustor—such as is common for USC steam turbines. It also leveraged its A-USC expertise to develop high-temperature materials for the casings and rotors in the sCO2 turbine. Engineering a durable thermal barrier coating (TBC), which they noted plays a crucial role in the sCO2 turbine and combustor’s cooling design (because temperature differences through the TBC in an sCO2 turbine is almost double that of conventional air-cooled gas turbines), posed as significant an engineering challenge. The company also engineered highly efficient cooling technologies, including cooling nozzles and blades, to manage the cycle’s extreme heat flux.

But finessing the technology has proven slower than expected. When Toshiba first announced it would develop the next thermal generation power system in June 2012, the company and partners Shaw Group, Exelon, and NET Power aimed to demonstrate the 25-MWe [mega watt electric; MWth is thermal] Allam cycle natural gas plant by mid-2014, planning a full-scale 250-MW commercial plant by 2017. However, while Toshiba wrapped up a six-month test to validate the combustor in August 2013 at a California facility (using a model that was a fifth of the one installed at NET Power), Toshiba first announced that it would supply the first-of-its-kind turbine in October 2014. The partners didn’t fully assemble and complete high-speed balancing tests for the rotor until August 2016. By October 2016, however, the turbine had been fully assembled and shipped to La Porte.

Powermag.com, April 1, 2019 - Inside NET Power: Gas Power Goes Supercritical.

Article: Page 1.

There you have it. Toshiba had some hurdles to overcome. Then they tested it out because it had never been done before sending over the completed turbine/SCO2 closed cycle heaters and combustor. Which is why the dates were pushed back and my thread title is off!

NET Power is doing cold start, warm start, hot start, and emergency shutdown tests (article page 2 or 3) and probably gathering a lot of data which will then have to be written down and presented which is why not much has been heard from them: they are busy working!

They are also looking for a 500 MWe site (paperwork due date was March 31 -same source) and want that to be up and running in 2021. Oddly enough, the combustor will be the same size it will just be that they have more and bigger SCO2 turbines to turn.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

When Zero Emissions come out of the Mouths from the Leftist Liberal Socialist Communist Democrat Party MAYBE I'll Give a Rats Ahass about this........

Thermal power plants working with oil or gas are now prone to bursting into flames during the coming days in the EU !
BTW ... how's weather freak storms going on ?

I heard the EU didn't like this year to see good weather during the May 9th Victory day parade in Moscow ... do they like it better now ?