Comparative Analysis of Oxygen Production for Oxy-combustion Application

Oxy-combustion is presently considered as the most promising technology to enable the capture of CO2 from fossil fuel based power plants. The concept of oxy-combustion is to use oxygen instead of air for the combustion process and to achieve a high concentration of CO2 in the flue gas. In this technology an exemplary 1 GWe thermal power plant will require daily about 18 000 tons of oxygen. A potential implementation of oxy-combustion on significant for power generation scale, would create the necessity of the oxygen production capacity increase by at least an order of magnitude in comparison to the present production rate. The paper categorizes the oxygen production methods and validates them with respect to oxy-combustion requirements. Present development in cryogenic air separation installations will be presented. A special attention is paid to sorption methods (TSA, PTSA) making use of heat cogenerated in thermal power plants. A novel use of high capacity heat pumps in air separation systems is proposed.