Economic Feasibility Study for Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells Fed with Biogas

Abstract

Molten carbonate fuel cell (MCFC) power plants are one of most attractive electricity generation systems for the use of biogas to generate high-efficiency ultra-clean power. However, MCFCs are considerably more expensive than comparable conventional electricity generation systems. The commercialization of MCFCs has been delayed more than expected. After being effective in the Kyoto protocol and considerably increasing the fossil price, the attention focused on CO 2 regression and renewable energy sources has increased dramatically. In particular, the commercialization and application of MCFC systems fed with biogas have been revived because of the characteristics of CO 2 collection and fuel variety of MCFCs. Better economic results of MCFC systems fed with biogas are expected because biogas is a relatively inexpensive fuel compared to liquefied natural gas (LNG). However, the pretreatment cost is added when using anaerobic digester gas (ADG), one of the biogases, as a fuel of MCFC systems because it contains high H 2 S and other contaminants, which are harmful sources to the MCFC stack in ADG. Thus, an accurate economic analysis and comparison between MCFCs fed with biogas and LNG are very necessary before the installation of an MCFC system fed with biogas in a plant. In this paper, the economic analysis of an MCFC fed with ADG was carried out for various conditions of electricity and fuel price and compared with the case of an MCFC fed with LNG.

Exergy & economic analysis of biogas fueled solid oxide fuel cell systems

“…A couple more examples are the recent start-up of a 1.4 MW molten carbonate fuel cell at a waste water treatment facility in California [10] and the planned 0.2 MW molten carbonate fuel cell at a waste water treatment facility in Wyoming [11]. There have been a number of previous numerical simulations and economic studies on integrating MCFCs with anaerobic digesters [12][13][14][15], as well as simulations on integrating SOFCs with anaerobic digesters [16][17][18][19][20].…”