A technical and economic study on solar-assisted ammonia-based post-combustion CO₂ capture of power plant

Highlights: • We examine the probability of solar energy in different locations for SPCC technology. • Numerical relationship between STC areas, the SF, and the APCM were analyzed. • Economic strategies were analyzed under different sensitive factor prices. • The critical price of STCs which causing benefits shift in policy priorities was identified. - Abstract: The market of solar-assisted post-combustion CO₂ capture (SPCC) is emerging globally in recent years. It is considered as a promising technology to apply the ammonia as the absorbent to implement the SPCC technology in view of its low regeneration temperature and low regeneration heat duty. However, few literatures indicate which type of solar thermal collectors (STCs) involved in the ammonia-based SPCC power plant is more applicable. Therefore, in this paper, the maximum theoretical potential price of STCs which make the value of the levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) and the cost of CO₂ removed (COR) lower than that of the reference post-combustion CO₂ capture (PCC) power plant is estimated. The potential of ammonia-based SPCC technology in the selected locations is also estimated, based on the detailed solar radiation resource assessment (i.e. DNI, sunshine time) and the STCs performance. It would be more attractive to adopt the vacuum tube (VT) as the STC involved into the ammonia-based PCC power plant to capture CO₂ than parabolic trough collector (PTC). In order to achieve lower LCOE and COR than that of the reference PCC system, the price of the vacuum tube (VT) has to be reduced to 131.02 $/m², 91.76 $/m² and 57.10 $/m² for the location of M1(Lhasa), M2(Tianjin) and M3(Xi'an), respectively. And the price of the parabolic trough collector (PTC) has to be reduced to 139.09 $/m², 89.83 $/m² and 50.84 $/m², respectively.