A power plant for integrated waste energy recovery from liquid air energy storage and liquefied natural gas

Liquefied natural gas(LNG)is regarded as one of the cleanest fossil fuel and has experienced significant developments in recent years.The liquefaction process of natural gas is energy-intensive,while the regasification of LNG gives out a huge amount of waste energy since plenty of high grade cold energy(-160℃)from LNG is released to sea water directly in most cases,and also sometimes LNG is burned for regasification.On the other hand,liquid air energy storage(LAES)is an emerging energy storage technology for applications such as peak load shifting of power grids,which generates 30%-40%of compression heat(-200℃).Such heat could lead to energy waste if not recovered and used.The recovery of the compression heat is technically feasible but requires additional capital investment,which may not always be economically attractive.Therefore,we propose a power plant for recovering the waste cryogenic energy from LNG regasification and compression heat from the LAES.The challenge for such a power plant is the wide working temperature range between the low-temperature exergy source(-160℃)and heat source(-200℃).Nitrogen and argon are proposed as the working fluids to address the challenge.Thermodynamic analyses are carried out and the results show that the power plant could achieve a thermal efficiency of 27%and 19%and an exergy efficiency of 40%and 28%for nitrogen and argon,respectively.Here,with the nitrogen as working fluid undergoes a complete Brayton Cycle,while the argon based power plant goes through a combined Brayton and Rankine Cycle.Besides,the economic analysis shows that the payback period of this proposed system is only 2.2 years,utilizing the excess heat from a 5 MW/40 MWh LAES system.The findings suggest that the waste energy based power plant could be co-located with the LNG terminal and LAES plant,providing additional power output and reducing energy waste.

The carbon dioxide removal potential of Liquid Air Energy Storage: A high-level technical and economic appraisal

Liquid Air Energy Storage(LAES)is at pilot scale.Air cooling and liquefaction stores energy;reheating revaporises the air at pressure,powering a turbine or engine(Ameel et al.,2013).Liquefaction requires water&CO2 removal,preventing ice fouling.This paper proposes subsequent geological storage of this CO2–offering a novel Carbon Dioxide Removal(CDR)by-product,for the energy storage industry.It additionally assesses the scale constraint and economic opportunity offered by implementing this CDR approach.Similarly,established Compressed Air Energy Storage(CAES)uses air compression and subsequent expansion.CAES could also add CO2 scrubbing and subsequent storage,at extra cost.CAES stores fewer joules per kilogram of air than LAES–potentially scrubbing more CO2 per joule stored.Operational LAES/CAES technologies cannot offer full-scale CDR this century(Stocker et al.,2014),yet they could offer around 4%of projected CO2 disposals for LAES and<25%for current-technology CAES.LAES CDR could reach trillion-dollar scale this century(20 billion USD/year,to first order).A larger,less certain commercial CDR opportunity exists for modified conventional CAES,due to additional equipment requirements.CDR may be commercially critical for LAES/CAES usage growth,and the necessary infrastructure may influence plant scaling and placement.A suggested design for low-pressure CAES theoretically offers global-scale CDR potential within a century(ignoring siting constraints)–but this must be costed against competing CDR and energy storage technologies.

Liquid Air Energy Storage for Decentralized Micro Energy Networks with Combined Cooling,Heating,Hot Water and Power Supply

Liquid air energy storage(LAES)has been regarded as a large-scale electrical storage technology.In this paper,we first investigate the performance of the current LAES(termed as a baseline LAES)over a far wider range of charging pressure(1 to 21 MPa).Our analyses show that the baseline LAES could achieve an electrical round trip efficiency(e RTE)above 60%at a high charging pressure of 19 MPa.The baseline LAES,however,produces a large amount of excess heat particularly at low charging pressures with the maximum occurred at~1 MPa.Hence,the performance of the baseline LAES,especially at low charging pressures,is underestimated by only considering electrical energy in all the previous research.The performance of the baseline LAES with excess heat is then evaluated which gives a high e RTE even at lower charging pressures;the local maximum of 62%is achieved at~4 MPa.As a result of the above,a hybrid LAES system is proposed to provide cooling,heating,hot water and power.To evaluate the performance of the hybrid LAES system,three performance indicators are considered:nominal-electrical round trip efficiency(ne RTE),primary energy savings and avoided carbon dioxide emissions.Our results show that the hybrid LAES can achieve a high ne RTE between 52%and 76%,with the maximum at~5 MPa.For a given size of hybrid LAES(1 MW×8 h),the primary energy savings and avoided carbon dioxide emissions are up to 12.1 MWh and 2.3 ton,respectively.These new findings suggest,for the first time,that small-scale LAES systems could be best operated at lower charging pressures and the technologies have a great potential for applications in local decentralized micro energy networks.

Simulation and analysis of a peak regulation gas power plant with advanced energy storage and cryogenic CO_(2) capture

Flexible gas power plants are subject to energy storage,peak regulations,and greenhouse gas emissions.This study proposes an integrated power generation system that combines liquid air energy storage(LAES),liquefied natural gas(LNG)cold energy utilization,gas power systems,and CO_(2) capture and storage(CCS)technologies,named the LAES-LNG-CCS system.The off-peak electricity can be stored in liquid air.During the peak period,air and gas turbines generate supplementary electricity.Both LNG chemical energy and cold energy were considered:the former was used for gas power plants,and the latter was used for LAES regasification and CCS processes.Based on the thermodynamic analysis,we evaluated the effects of the recovery pressure,CCS pressure,and combustion temperature on the system power consumption and efficiency.The results demonstrated that the system recovery pressure,CCS pressure,and combustion temperature had the greatest effects on system power generation.Round-trip efficiency(RTE)was significantly affected by combustion temperature.The largest exergy loss occurred in the gas power plant.The optimal system operating ranges of the system recovery pressure,CCS pressure,and combustion temperature were 6−10 MPa,0.53−0.8 MPa,and 1,503−1,773 K,where the RTEs and𝜂Ex,RS reached 55%−58.98%and 74.6%−76%,respectively.The proposed system can simultaneously achieve the synergistic functions of large-scale energy storage,multilevel energy utilization,peak regulation,and carbon emission reduction.It can also be widely used in advanced distributed energy storage applications in the future.