Gas switching reforming (GSR) for power generation with CO₂ capture: Process efficiency improvement studies

This paper presents the process improvement studies of a combined cycle power plant integrated with a novel gas switching reforming (GSR) process for hydrogen production with integrated CO₂ capture. The overall process is denoted as GSR-CC (gas switching reforming-combined cycle). Five cases are presented in which a systematic approach was adopted to improve the net electrical efficiency of the GSR-CC process. Two cases focus on reducing the number of unit operations and the other three cases focus on heat integration. The net electrical efficiency of the base case GSR-CC process is 45.8% whereas the improved GSR-CC has a net electrical efficiency of 51.1%. The efficiency penalty in the improved GSR-CC process is only 7.2 %-points with respect to the reference case natural gas combined cycle power plant without CO₂ capture, and is less than post-combustion capture methods presented in literature. The CO₂ avoidance in the GSR-CC is more than 95%. GSR-CC also gives a flexibility in the output from the plant in terms of pure H₂ or electricity and the optimal plant configuration is designed to maximize this flexibility.