Comparative Performance and Cost Assessments of Coal- and Natural-Gas-Fired Power Plants under a CO2 Emission Performance Standard Regulation

State and federal governments are considering performance standards to limit carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from new fossil-fuel-fired electric-generating units. This study employs a newly developed computational tool to compare the performance and cost impacts of applying a technology-neutral CO₂ emission performance standard to pulverized coal (PC) and natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plants and to evaluate the role of CO₂ utilization in accelerating carbon capture and storage (CCS) deployment. We explore the impacts of performance standards between 1000 and 300 lb of CO₂/MWh gross, a range more stringent than the recently proposed standard by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA). Meeting such standards would require CO₂ emission reductions of roughly 45–85% for new PC baseload plants and 0–65% for new NGCC baseload plants. Adding current amine-based CCS to meet these standards increases the plant levelized cost of electricity by 35–66% for PC plants and 0–26% for NGCC plants. On an absolute basis, meeting the most stringent standard of 300 lb/MWh gross would add $38.9/MWh to the cost of the PC plant but only $16.5/MWh for the NGCC plant. This cost advantage of NGCC plants relative to PC plants is strongly affected by plant capacity factor and natural gas price and could be diminished by gas prices above approximately $9.0/GJ for new baseload plants subject to a range of performance standards. Our analysis of the enhanced oil recovery (EOR) option shows that, at a price of roughly $40/metric ton of CO₂, the revenue from selling the captured CO₂ for the EOR could fully offset the capture cost for PC plants. Higher CO₂ prices would be required to fully pay for CO₂ capture at NGCC plants. Using the captured CO₂ for EOR thus would facilitate continued coal use for low-carbon electricity generation, even under the most stringent performance standard modeled.