SuperCritical Auto-Thermal Rankine (SCATR) System: High Efficiency Fossil Fuel Based Electricity With Intrinsic Carbon Separation

This paper presents SCATR: a novel, high-efficiency electricity generation system with carbon separation. The system uses oxygen from an air separation unit to burn methane in supercritical water, expanding the resulting products stream through turbines to generate power. The water is condensed, preheated, and recycled through the plant, leaving a stream of CO2 compressed to pipeline pressures. The details of the model are discussed, and an exergy analysis of the system is performed, providing insight into the operation of the plant as well as possible avenues for improvements. The efficiency of the system, including air separation and CO2 separation, is found to be 42.3% relative to the HHV of methane (or 47.0% relative to its LHV).Copyright © 2012 by ASME