Environmental Analysis of Different Scenarios of Power Generation in Iran with Natural Gas, Vacuum Residue and Syngas Feedstock

摘要

Today, a large amount of worldwide primary energy consumption comes from fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas. According to International Energy Agency, about 40% of total primary energy is used for the electricity generation. In spite of the available state-of-art technologies in the refining industry that can significantly reduce the volume of refinery bottom products, heavy fuel oil is still produced and plays an important role in providing required energy worldwide. However, there could be environmental problems associated with burning these used heavy fuel oils. As a result of the gas pressure drop in natural grid pipelines in the cold seasons, the feedstock of steam power plant changes from the natural gas into the heavy fuel oil. Sometime this change is happening for the whole winter and causes lots of environmental problems for the cities near the big power plant in the country same as Arak. Gasification process is an energy conversion technology in which the solid or heavy fuel oil feedstock are partially oxidized with the oxygen and the steam to produce the syngas (mainly a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) which can be used either for the conversion into different valuable compounds (e.g. hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, liquid fuels) or to generate power. Environmental analysis of different feedstock applications in a 1000 megawatt steam power plant (six units of a 165 megawatt steam turbine) is considered in this article. Natural gas, heavy fuel oil and syngas (generated from gasification of fuel oil) are selected as the steam power plant feedstock.