Co-firing of ammonia and hydrogen in coal-fired or gas-fired power plants is one of the many greentechs in focus for extensive research and demonstration to combat climate change. However, the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland, California-based research group said that hydrogen and ammonia production, and co-firing yield little climate benefits and represent “a wasteful use of valuable low-carbon hydrogen and ammonia”. Recently, Japanese Mitsui & Co made a deal to supply ammonia for co-firing at Jera Co’s Hekinan Thermal Power Station. Meanwhile, South Korea aims to use hydrogen and ammonia in its existing coal power plants. Southeast Asian countries including Indonesia have also signed agreements to research domestic co-firing potential. Is this story similar to EV development?
AMMONIA IS THE KEY TO FUEL SWITCHING AND ENERGY TRANSITION. Fuel switching in power generation is to separate CO2 from fossil fuel, and/or replace it with green fuel (hashtag#hydrogen or hashtag#ammonia). These are integrated gasification combined cycles (hashtag#IGCC), co-firing with green hydrogen or green ammonia. Phase-out coal is not simply to stop using coal as fuel but to maximize the co-firing rate or to apply gasification of coal to switch to green fuel. The IGCC technology was promoted for more than 20 years. It is very likely with carbon capture technology, but CO2 is captured from the gasification process of coal or gas. The total efficiency of the plant to produce green electricity and capture CO2 is reportedly reduced by 5 to 10%. The non-stop operation of the gasification in IGCC makes it higher OPEX because of redundancy requirements. A typical of IGCC is the hashtag#Jazan IGCC complex recognized as the world’s largest IGCC complex, southwest of Saudi Arabia. An IGCC success story is the 250 MW Buggenum plant in The Netherlands. This coal-based IGCC plant currently uses about 30% biomass as a supplemental feedstock (GEM 2023). The obstacle of high cost and availability makes the IGCC technology slow progress. However, governments still give subsidies for feasibility study and FEED to study the risk of implementation. A typical project is the ZeroGen 500MW IGCC project in Central Queensland, Australia. In the search for green fuel, 04 types of hydrocarbon emerged: ammonia (NH3), hydrogen (H2), methane (CH4) and propane (C3H8). In fact, these have been well-known to people for a long time and have been used in industry. Ammonia for fertilizer, and hydrogen has been produced and used as cooling medium in power plant… But this time with large volume and to burn as a replacement to coal or gas. Japan and Korea are the most interested in hydrogen and ammonia. Japan has a strategy to retrofit the coal fleet with ammonia co-firing from 2030 to 2050 with the rate increased from 20% to 50% and 100% ammonia. Companies supported by the government to develop the technology are hashtag#IHI, hashtag#MHI, hashtag#JERA, hashtag#Doosan, hashtag#Kepco and hashtag#Samsung (BloombergNEF, September 2022). In many research projects, it has been tested the mix within 04 hydrocarbons, but ammonia was chosen because of the advantage of unit cost since other hydrocarbons were manufactured by ammonia-cracking. The co-firing technology is being tested for gas-fired and coal-fired power generation but they found that co-firing with ammonia caused low flame stability, high NOx and a mix rate is up to 20%. A recent report from hashtag#BloombergNEF revealed that the technology needs more time to be cost-effective, especially the 50% and 100% mix rate is important to scale up the deployment. However, it is strongly believed that 50% co-firing ammonia technology will be successful and commercialized by 2030.
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