Process simulation study of coal gasification-based multi-product plant with electricity and chemical products

ABSTRACT In this study, the commercial chemical process simulator, PRO/II® V8.1.1, is implemented to perform the simulation of a coal gasification‐based co‐production system, of which the feedstock is kaltim prima coal from Indonesia, and the products are electricity and dimethyl ether (DME). There are five major blocks in the multi‐product plant, i.e. air separation unit (ASU), gasification unit, gas clean‐up unit, combined‐cycle, and DME synthetic unit. ASU utilizes cryogenic air separation process, which provides oxygen with 95 mol% purity to the gasification unit and nitrogen to the combined‐cycle. General Electric technologies are employed in the study, i.e. quench‐type slurry‐fed gasifier for the former and 7FB‐series turboset for the latter. The clean‐up unit includes dry solids removal, syngas scrubbing, sulfur compounds removal, and sulfur recovery processes, which are implemented to deliver clean syngas to further processes and elemental sulfur from H2S. The clean syngas is divided into two equal streams to generate electricity and produce DME, simultaneously. The results show that the gross and net electrical power outputs are 371.6 and 275.1 MW, respectively; furthermore, the yield of DME is 51.78 mt/h. In summary, the net efficiency of the coal gasification‐based multi‐product plant is 46.1% (HHV), which is higher than the counterpart of typical integrated gasification combined‐cycle plants by over four percentage points. © 2012 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.