GE Gas Power has announced that the company’s front-end engineering design (FEED) study ‘Retrofittable Advanced Combined Cycle Integration for Flexible Decarbonised Generation’ is to receive $5.77 million in federal funding from the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management following successful completion of the award negotiation phase. This funding is focused on carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS) for power generation applications with a goal of commercial deployment by 2030. GE Gas Power will work with Southern Company, Linde, BASF, and Kiewit to develop a detailed plan for integrating carbon capture technologies with a natural gas combined cycle plant to capture approximately 95 % of the carbon dioxide emissions generated.
The FEED study will be focused on Southern Company subsidiary Alabama Power’s James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, located in Bucks, Alabama, which is powered by two GE 7F.04 gas turbines, part of GE’s 7F gas turbine fleet, the largest in N America. GE will research advanced technology and control concepts to integrate the combined cycle power plant with Linde’s Gen 2 carbon capture solution based on BASF OASE blue technology. The project will also include gas and steam turbine equipment enhancements to improve the carbon capture process, with a goal of reducing the impact of the carbon capture process on the power plant’s output, performance, and equipment cost.
With the goals of reliability, load flexibility, and significant reduction in carbon emissions, this retrofittable solution should prove to be applicable to other power plant sites and serve as a template for lowering carbon emissions across more than 1500 F-Class gas turbines worldwide, which currently deliver up to approximately 280 GWe daily.
Due to the complexity of the integration of CCUS technologies into an existing natural gas power plant, this FEED study – a detailed blueprint and operating business guide – will represent a pre-requisite for future construction projects and it can accelerate commercial deployment of other projects. GE will lead the full-scale integration of the study with the goal of preserving the attributes of a natural gas combined cycle plants that are critical to enable a renewable energy-based future including dispatchability, lower carbon intensity, high flexibility and reliability, and low capital cost.
- GE and Linde have also announced they signed an agreement in December 2021 to strengthen their existing co-operation with a specific focus on exploring carbon capture and storage opportunities in North America by leveraging GE’s expertise in power generation technology and plant integration with Linde’s experience with post combustion amine-based carbon capture processes. This agreement should also provide new opportunities for North America customers that operate GE gas turbines to pursue the adoption of CCUS technologies.
BASF will provide OASE blue technology. “OASE Blue was developed specifically for large-scale post-combustion capture (PCC) technology,” said Todd Spengeman, business director – Standard Amines & OASE Gas Treating Excellence. “With low energy consumption and exceptionally flexible operating range it is a paramount technology for use in flue gas carbon capture from sources such as fossil power generation plants or steam turbines”. Kiewit will provide engineering procurement construction capabilities.
