Techno-economic and environmental assessment of staged oxy-co-firing of biomass-derived syngas and natural gas

Abstract The utilisation of biomass is regarded as a promising technology as a negative CO2 resource and is widely under investigation. Although being a developing technology predominantly used as the axillary fuel, the interest in biomass gasification has increased since the last decade due to increased attention in sustainable bioenergy. Therefore, in this study, a novel process of biomass-derived syngas and natural gas oxy-co-firing is being investigated. Aspen Plus® is employed to develop the staged oxy-co-firing of biomass-based syngas and the natural gas cycle. The results revealed that the net power efficiencies are in the range of 42.6% and 45.5%. Furthermore, the economic assessment reveals that the LCOE increases with the increment of biomass flowrate with the highest cost of €79.6/MWh for 7 kg/s biomass mass flow rate. The effect of different biomass prices on LCOE is also investigated. It proved that the implementation of biomass with the price of €80/tdry results in the competitive LCOE to the state-of-the-art power cycles without carbon capture system (€62.9/MWh). On the other hand, the environmental analysis reveals that in order to have a negative CO2 emission power cycle, the minimum biomass flowrate should be at 7 kg/s which results in specific negative CO2 emission and total life cycle of CO2 emission of 195.5 and 168.5 kg CO2/MWh, respectively.