Techno-economic analysis and optimisation of Piperazine-based Post-combustion carbon capture and CO2 compression process for large-scale biomass-fired power plants through simulation

• Simulation of MEA and PZ-based PCC process and validation at pilot scale. • MEA and PZ-based PCC process was scaled up for a 550 MW supercritical biomass-fired power plant. • Different configurations of PCC for a large-scale biomass plants were simulated. • Energy consumption of optimised PZ-based PCC with AIC-AFS is 41.6% lower than standard PCC using 40 wt% PZ. • The CO 2 capture cost of optimised PZ-based PCC with AIC-AFS is 32.4% lower than standard PCC using 40 wt% PZ. This study aims to investigate a cost-effective and energy-efficient amine-based post-combustion carbon capture (PCC) process for large-scale supercritical biomass-fired power plants (SC BFPP). Thus, we have quantified the energy and economic performance of the PCC process with different configurations and solvents. Three process configurations which included the standard configuration, the absorber intercooler (AIC) with the advanced flash stripper (AFS) and the AIC, AFS and side stream extraction (SSE) were simulated in Aspen Plus® V11 using 30 wt% and 40 wt% piperazine (PZ) as solvent. In addition to this, CO 2 compression trains using the heat pump (HP) and supercritical CO 2 cycle (s-CO 2 ) were also simulated. Sensitivity analysis of the PCC process was carried out to investigate the impact of important parameters on the energy performance of the process. Furthermore, energy analysis shows that a minimum energy consumption of 2.78 GJ/t CO2 was achieved with the PCC process using 40 wt% PZ, a combination of the AIC, AFS and SSE for capture and s-CO 2 for compression. This achieved a significant energy saving of 1.01 GJ/t CO2 compared with the standard PCC process using 30 wt% monoethanolamine that is used as the benchmark in this study. The economic analysis results showed that the minimum CO 2 capture cost of 55.70 $/t CO2 was achieved using the AIC-AFS-SSE-sCO 2 configuration and 40 wt% PZ as solvent. This represents a 19.5 % reduction in cost compared with the standard 40 wt% PZ process with a cost of 69.18 $/t CO2 . The optimisation of the PZ-based PCC process was carried out to determine the optimal solvent concentration with the minimum carbon capture cost. It was found that the optimal PZ concentration for the PCC process based on standard and AFS configurations were 37.5 wt% and 32.5 wt%, respectively. The optimisation of the stripper pressure for the minimum carbon capture cost was conducted. As a result, compared with the standard PCC process using 40 wt% PZ, the energy consumption and CO 2 capture cost of the optimised process at the suggested pressure of 7 bar were reduced by 41.6 % and 32.4 %, respectively.