The research project POSEIDON is conducted in the framework of the COORETEC Programme.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, aside from efficiency improvements, increasing attention is given to separation and storage of CO₂. In this context three technologies with different CO₂ separation paths are investigated. One of them is based on the steam power plant process and uses scrubbing of the CO₂ from the flue gas at atmospheric pressure with chemical absorbents ("end-of-pipe" solution). This process is referred to as post-combustion capture.

For the regeneration of the absorbent large quantities of heat are required, which are usually supplied by low-pressure steam extracted from the steam turbine. Therefore the power plant efficiency is decreased by 10-14%-points. Despite the high efficiency decrease, post-combustion CO₂-separation offers the possibility of a retrofit of existing plants as well as the potential of flexible operation with large power reserves.

The main interest of the utilities with regard to Post-Combustion Capture technologies lies in the identification of the processes and process integration alternatives which offer the lowest efficiency decreases and life cycle costs and only cause minimal environmental impact. In addition, future applications of CO₂ mitigating technologies need to possess flexible operation and load-following abilities in order to be used effectively in commercial operation. Therefore, the POSEIDON project not only examines stationary operation of power plants equipped with Post-Combustion Capture technology, but also deals with the dynamic plant behaviour under fluctuating conditions.

For the above reasons and based on studies on CO₂ capture in fossil power plants which were already carried out by IET will investigate the optimisation of the most promising Post-Combustion Capture processes based on chemical absorption, their best possible integration in the power plant process, the dynamic behaviour of the entire process, the reliability, availability, maintainability and operability as well as the economic representation in competition with other technologies (pre-combustion and oxyfuel). The most important solvents and process control variants shall be evaluated in order to identify and compare the most promising approaches.