This paper discusses a commercially viable and novel technology that enables therecovery of the water vapor contained in power plant flue gas streams.Currently, fossil fuel-based power plants consume vast quantities of water for heatrejection, fuel preparation, power augmentation, emissions control, and cyclemakeup purposes. At the same time, global water resources are becoming moredifficult to procure as water consumption outstrips the pace of renewal. At present,the strategy used to reduce power plant water consumption in areas where waterrestrictions are stringent is to employ an air-cooled condenser as opposed to once-throughcooling or a cooling tower. However, even plants with air-cooled condensersto minimize water consumption require a significant amount of water in several casesin order to allow for required steam drum blowdown, power augmentation systems,and gas turbine inlet evaporative cooling or fogging systems in addition to theaforementioned uses. To offset these observed escalating consumption rates, a newsystem was devised that can recover a substantial portion of the water vapor presentin a flue gas stream. The water recovered by this system is of a quality similar to thatof a reverse osmosis system outlet (RO Out). This water can be used for variousplant needs as recovered or can receive minimal treatment so that it can be used asdirect-cycle makeup.Siemens Power Generation, Inc. (SPG) and the Energy & Environmental ResearchCenter (EERC) at the University of North Dakota have successfully completed thefirst phase of a U.S. Department of Energy supported pilot-scale program thatverified the technical viability of this system. SPG, with the cooperation of the EERC,is currently developing a commercial partnership with the goal of having a 1/10-scaleslipstream commercial demonstration by the end of 2007.This paper provides a detailed description of the pilot-scale system and processconditions, presents the reportable results of the recent pilot-scale test program, anddiscusses the expected commercial characteristics.
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