Pilot CO2 capture plant for coal power plants

Staudinger Power Plant. Source: Siemens/E.ON

E.ON and Siemens are putting a pilot CO₂ capture plant into operation at the E.ON power plant Staudinger in Grosskrotzenburg near Hanau. The two companies are thus pushing further ahead with the development of a process geared toward climate-friendly coal-based power generation. A lab-proven process is to be employed under real operating conditions at the power plant’s hard-coal-fired Staudinger.

The pilot plant will be operated with part of the flue gas from Unit 5. E.ON and Siemens intend to run the pilot plant until the end of 2010. The results achieved and the operating performance of the pilot plant will serve as the basis for large-scale demonstration plants, which are scheduled to start operation in the middle of the next decade.

In the future, too, it will not be possible to meet the rapidly growing power demand without using fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. “The challenge is to attain a significant reduction in the CO₂ emissions associated with the combustion of fossil fuels. In this context CO₂ capture and storage technologies will be of decisive importance,” said Michael Suess, CEO of the Fossil Power Generation Division of Siemens Energy.

“These technologies are available but they have to be tested for deployment in large plants, developed further and brought to market readiness. The pilot plant in the Staudinger power plant will bring us a decisive step forward here,” added Suess.
“As a major contribution toward climate protection E.ON is planning industrial-scale CO₂ capture and storage for coal-fired power plants starting in 2020.

Operation of this new plant together with Siemens as part of our pilot fleet is an important step in this direction,” said Bernhard Fischer, Member of the Managing Board of E.ON Energie AG and E:ON’s CTO. Fischer added: “With the post-combustion process we are focusing on an highly promising CO₂ capture technology, which can be backfitted in existing power plants.”

The project is being sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Economics under the terms of the COORETEC Initiative. It is part of the federal government’s 5th Energy Research Program “Innovation and New Energy Technologies” and promotes research and development in the field of low-CO₂ power plant technologies.

With the post-combustion capture process developed by Siemens more than 90 per cent of the CO₂ is removed from a power plant’s flue gas using special cleaning agents. One of the advantages of this technology is that it can be combined with the well-known and further developed steam power plant process. In the CCS pilot plant at the Staudinger power plant the cleaning agent’s long-term chemical stability and the efficiency of the process are now being put to the test under real power plant conditions.

In parallel, the technology will be further optimised in terms of energy consumption. Our process is characterised among other things by good environmental compatibility, comparatively low energy consumption and only very low loss of the cleaning agent used,” said Suess.

The technology for CO₂ capture from the flue gas of power plants is part of the Siemens environmental portfolio with which the company earned revenues of nearly EUR19 billion in fiscal 2008, That is, equivalent to about a quarter of Siemens’ total revenue and makes Siemens the world’s leading provider of eco-friendly technology.