The Oxyfuel Baseline: Revamping Heaters and Boilers to Oxyfiring by Cryogenic Air Separation and Flue Gas Recycle

This chapter presents the results of a feasibility study that involves the potential application of oxyfuel technology to a complete refinery system with multiple CO 2 emission points spread out over a large area. This involves a centralized oxygen supply system and a CO 2 recovery, purification, and compression facility. The study shows that primary effluent gas cooling, compression and drying is best decentralized to be close to the emission points and an intermediate pressure CO 2 stream can then be routed to a centralized collection point for final purification and compression to pipeline pressure. The CO 2 purification system can be designed to handle practical levels of air leakage into boilers and process heaters to produce a purity of CO 2 suitable for geological sequestration. The level of air leakage into boilers and heaters that are retrofitted for oxyfuel means that it is more economic to design the Air Separation Units (ASUs) for only 95% purity and reject the associated argon and nitrogen in the CO 2 inert gas removal system.