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6 December 2007 -- The Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group said it burned coal in full oxygen-combustion mode at a 30 MWth scale during recent testing at its Clean Environment Development Facility in Alliance, Ohio. The facility operated in full oxygen-coal combustion mode for over 250 hours as it burned more than 500 tons of bituminous coal.
B&W PGG's oxygen-coal combustion process uses oxygen to fire coal, rather than traditional air used currently at coal-fired power plants. With oxygen combustion, the nitrogen component of air is eliminated, creating an oxygen stream to fire the coal. As a result, the exhaust gas from the oxygen-combustion process is relatively pure CO2, rather than being mixed with nitrogen and other emissions. The relatively pure CO2 exhaust gas results in less emissions volume, is easier to capture and with further purification is ready for long-term storage or for other purposes such as enhanced oil recovery applications.
B&W PGG worked on this project with American Air Liquide, which provided the oxygen, engineering and chemistry expertise related to its combustion, as well as equipment and sensors to handle the liquefied oxygen used during testing.
B&W PGG will next test sub-bituminous, lignite and Powder River Basin coals. When all test work is completed early next year, almost 4,000 tons of coal will have been consumed. Data from the project will then form the foundation to design a large-scale reference plant to implement this technology at commercial scale.
B&W PGG said it is seeking interested parties to conduct further oxy-coal combustion testing at a large demonstration plant in which more than a million tons of CO2 could be captured in a single year.
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