February 15, 2008

Accelerating the deployment of cleaner coal plants

Jack Parkes, Neville Holt, and Jeffrey Phillips, Electric Power Research Institute

CoalFleet for Tomorrow

 An EPRI-sponsored collaborative effort—called the CoalFleet for Tomorrow program—seeks to lower the hurdle of technology development by deploying the first group of full-scale advanced coal plants as quickly as possible. Launched in 2004, the program brings together a broad cross section of generating companies, turbine and boiler suppliers, engineering/procurement/construction (EPC) firms, and research partners from around the world. Today, more than 60 companies from five continents are active participants in the effort.

One of CoalFleet’s key initiatives is a unique, circular, learn-by-doing process in which expert information is provided to utilities developing plant designs, and the utilities’ experience is fed back into growing databases of information on advanced coal technologies.

The process works as follows. EPRI provides expert consultation to an “early deployment project” (EDP) utility that has committed to design and build a new IGCC, USC PC, or SC FBC plant. For this consultation, EPRI enlists a large team of independent world-class experts to work with its own knowledgeable staff to advise the EDP utility on how to optimize the plant’s design. In return for the expert advice, the utility shares nonproprietary information from its site-specific feasibility studies and front-end engineering designs (FEEDs) with the broader CoalFleet membership.

The expert consultations and the feedback from EDPs are creating a family of design guidelines and permitting data and guidance that are continually updated to reflect new information and lessons learned. It is estimated that participating in this process could cut the costs of feasibility and preliminary engineering studies by 30% to 50%, shorten a project’s development cycle by up to two years, and reduce an advanced coal plant’s capital costs by $100/kW to $200/kW or more.