Thermal integration of a natural gas combined cycle power plant with carbon capture and utilization technologies

•Carbon capture processes can be combined with utilization technologies.•Utilization technologies for syngas, methanol and formic acid are considered.•Thermal integration is used to provide energy-efficient structures.•The energy, environmental and power benefits are shown. One of the strategies to reduce CO2 emissions consists in the implementation of carbon capture processes, which can then be combined with carbon utilization technologies to produce value-added products. In this work, four capture and utilization processes to produce syngas via two possible routes, formic acid, and methanol are considered. Such processes are subjected to the application of thermal integration strategies aiming to improve the economic, energy and environmental properties of those technologies. It is shown that through the strategic integration of hot and cold process streams, more energy-efficient configurations can be achieved, with reductions in energy requirements that can range from 20 to 50% with respect to the original capture and utilization technologies. Such energy savings can also provide reductions of 0.04 e-CO2 (kg/kg) for the formic acid case, and an improved net plant efficiency of 51% for the dry reforming process. These benefits are achieved at the expense of an increase of 1 to 2% in total capital investment for the heat exchanger networks.