CO2 Capture for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants

An overview of technologies for fossil fuel-fired power plants with drastically reduced CO2 emissions is given. Post-combustion capture, pre-combustion capture, and oxyfuel technology are introduced and compared. Current research results indicate that post-combustion capture may lead to slightly higher losses in power plant efficiency than the two other technologies. However, retrofitting of existing plants with oxyfuel technology is complex and costly, and retrofitting of pre-combustion capture is not possible. On the other hand, post-combustion capture can be retrofitted to existing power plants with only minimal effort. Based on the mature technology of reactive absorption, it can be implemented on a large scale in the near future. Therefore, post-combustion capture using reactive absorption is discussed here in some detail.