POWER June 2021 - 12

GLOBAL MONITOR
5. The 543-MW Nakoso integrated coal gasification
combined cycle (IGCC) facility in Fukushima
prefecture began operations on April
16, 2021. Courtesy: Mitsubishi Power
is 950g CO2
/kWh at generator terminal,
with the IGCC we are targeting emissions
of 650g CO2
/kWh at generator terminal, "
it said. Catering to growing fuel flexibility
needs, the gasification process is also
more accommodating of various coal
types, especially those with low-meltingpoint
ash, than pulverized coal boilers.
Nakoso IGCC (and the Hirono unit,
when it comes online as slated at the
end of this year) join only a handful of
commercial-sized IGCC coal-fired power
plants that are operational around the
world. Along with the Nakoso IGCC unit
and Nakoso Unit 10, Duke Energy continues
to operate the 2013-built 618-MW
Edwardsport IGCC Station in Indiana.
Owing to cost pressures and uncertainty
around carbon emissions policy, several
iconic IGCC plants have closed over the
past decade. These include the 300-MW
Puertollano unit in Spain and the 250MW
unit in Buggenum in the Netherlands.
In the U.S., it's unclear if Tampa
Electric's 1996-completed 250-MW Unit
1 at the Polk Power Station in Florida
is still operational. Plans to close the
1995-completed 265-MW Wabash IGCC
in Indiana, meanwhile, appear to have
been reversed to convert the plant into
an anhydrous ammonia production plant
with a co-located carbon capture facility.
As Toby Lockwood, a senior analyst
and event lead for the International Energy
Agency Clean Coal Centre (IEA CCC),
pointed out in a February 2021 report, interest
in IGCC technology has waxed and
waned, driven mainly by policy and economics.
While a number of demonstration
IGCC plants were deployed in the 1990s
and early 2000s in the U.S., Europe, and
Japan, IGCC plants failed to gain popularity
owing to " unexpectedly high costs for
several of these units, complexity of operation,
and the concurrent improvement
in pulverized coal plant efficiency, "
Interest was renewed in the late
12
2000s due to its potential application in
pre-combustion capture of carbon dioxide,
but several pre-combustion demonstration
projects-among them, the U.S.
Department of Energy's (DOE's) FutureGen,
Australia's Zerogen, and Southern
Co.'s Kemper County IGCC project-
were ultimately scrapped or repurposed.
In China, the 250-MW GreenGen IGCC
was completed in 2015, but " planned
phases to introduce CCUS [carbon capture,
utilization, and storage] and construct
a larger scale unit have apparently
stalled, " Lockwood said.
But in Japan, research, development,
and demonstration (RD&D) has continued
in advanced coal technologies to further
enhance coal power's economic and
environmental performance, Lockwood
noted. More than 80% of the country's
roughly 43-GW utility coal fleet currently
uses supercritical steam conditions (over
half of which is classed as USC), and it
remains heavily associated with high-efficiency
low-emissions (HELE) coal technologies,
he said.
Japan's leadership in developing and
deploying HELE technologies was initially
motivated by economics and security of
supply considerations after the country
closed most of its nuclear plants in Fukushima's
aftermath. But in recent years,
USC technology " has become a key element
of Japan's CO2
emissions reduction
strategy, " he said. The country's 2013
revision of the Energy Conservation Act,
for example, requires that new coal units
achieve greater than 42% efficiency on
a gross higher heating value (HHV-or
more than 44% on a lower heating value
[LHV]) basis, with some exceptions.
In the early 2020s, meanwhile, the
government has set out to achieve the
practical use of advanced USC and IGCC
plants, which it says are capable of
achieving efficiencies greater than 46%.
As notably, Japan is spearheading a demonstration
of integrated gasification fuel
cell (IGFC) technology, which Lockwood
describes as an " innovative variant on
the IGCC plant " that uses coal-derived
hydrogen in a fuel cell.
Backed by Japan's New Energy and
Industrial Technology Development Organization
(NEDO), the 166-MW Osaki
CoolGen Project will integrate an already
demonstrated oxygen-blown IGCC technology
with carbon capture, and then
integrate that system with solid oxide
fuel cells. Oxygen-blown IGCC, Osaki
CoolGen says, is essentially the process
to gasify coal and generate syngas
with carbon monoxide and hydrogen as
its main components. A demonstration
in 2018 showed that the process can
achieve " a net thermal efficiency of approximately
46% on a commercial plant,
and could expect to cut CO2
emissions
by approximately 15% " compared to a
USC project, Osaki CoolGen said. While
the project is currently in detailed design
and construction, the entity anticipates
that the full IGFC demonstration will begin
in fiscal year 2022.
Because Japan is
looking
to export
these technologies to emerging economies,
over the near term at least, successful
operation of the new Nakoso and
Hirono units " could lead to a new wave of
IGCC deployment around the world, " Lockwood
said. However, in parallel, interest is
growing in coal gasification with CCUS as
a low-cost source of hydrogen, and that
is also helping drive other IGCC projects
around the world, he said. " Two of the
projects funded under the latest round of
the U.S. DOE's Coal FIRST initiative are associated
with coal gasification, with a view
to producing both low-carbon power and
hydrogen. There is also potential for IGCC
to play a role in India's current drive to expand
coal gasification capability, known as
'the Methanol Economy,' " he said.
-Sonal Patel is senior associate editor
for POWER.
POWER Digest
6. The gasifier in the air-blown IGCC design
has a two-chamber two-stage structure, consisting
of a combustor in the lower (first) stage
and a reductor in the upper (second) stage.
Courtesy: Mitsubishi Power
www.powermag.com
CNL Successfully Fabricates Advanced
Small Modular Reactor (SMR) Fuel. Canadian
nuclear science and technology
organization Canadian Nuclear Laboratories
(CNL) on April 13 announced
it successfully fabricated Fully Ceramic
Microencapsulated (FCM) fuel pellets
designed by Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp.
(USNC) for its Micro Modular Reactor
(MMR). The project was funded by the Canadian
Nuclear Research Initiative, an orPOWER
| June 2021
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POWER June 2021

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