Catalytic hydrogenation of CO2 from 600 MW supercritical coal power plant to produce methanol: A techno-economic analysis.

Electricity and water from renewable hydropower plant are used as input for electrolysis unit to generate hydrogen, while CO 2 is captured from 600 MW supercritical coal power plant using post-combustion chemical solvent based technology. The captured CO 2 and H 2 generated through electrolysis are used to synthesize methanol through catalytic thermo-chemical reaction. The methanol synthesis plant is designed, modeled and simulated using commercial software Aspen Plus ® . The reactor is analyzed for two widely adopted kinetic models known as Graaf model and Vanden-Bossche (VB) model to predict the methanol yield and CO 2 conversion. The results show that the methanol reactor based on Graaf kinetic model produced 0.66 tonne of methanol per tonne of CO 2 utilized which is higher than that of the VB kinetic model where 0.6 tonne of methanol is produced per tonne of CO 2 utilized. The economic analysis reveals that 1.2 billion USD annually is required at the present cost of both H 2 production and CO 2 abatement to utilize continuous emission of 3.2 million tonne of CO 2 annually from 600 MW supercritical coal power unit to synthesize methanol. However, sensitivity analysis indicates that methanol production becomes feasible by adopting anyone of the route such as by increasing methanol production rate, by reducing levelised cost of hydrogen production, by reducing CO 2 mitigation cost or by increasing the current market selling price of methanol and oxygen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]