Comparable life cycle CO2 emissions to open cycle gas turbines
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CO2
...a step reduction in CO2 over current coal fired power generation
Lower ash and viscosity than coal water fuel for boilers
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New coal fuel
...lower ash and viscosity than coal water fuel for boilers
Larger more efficient engines
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New engines
...cost comparable with combined cycle gas
MRC Production
DICE requires cost-effective production of ultra-low ash water based slurry fuel called MRC. The earlier USDOE work concluded that coal with 2–3% ash was suitable for DICE. The ash will be a trade-off between processing cost, and maintenance costs. Depending on engine speed, MRC should have a top size of 50 µm, a coal loading of 50-55%, and enable pressure atomisation. Coarser and higher solids MRC will likely be preferred for future engines.
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Engines
It is generally accepted that lower speed diesel engines are most suitable: the low-speed two-stroke marine-type engines (10–100 MW at 90–120 rpm) and largest four-stroke medium-speed engines (20 MW at 400-500 rpm). This is due to their low maintenance, longevity and tolerance to current lower quality fuels.
The choice of engine will be site and application dependent: the low-speed engine has slightly higher efficiency and lower maintenance costs but the cost is $2 M/MW compared to $1.2 M/MW for medium-speed engines.
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DICE needs considerable development and demonstration to match the technical development of current technologies, but has strong technical merit because of the ability to carry out a near-commercial scale demonstration at a relatively small size (around 10 MW), both quickly and at relatively low cost. A staged development program has been devised with MAN for both black and brown coals, to de-risk the demonstration projects proposed for 2015.
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