ABSTRACT
As the pressure rises to implement strategies to minimize emissions of CO2 and other gases contributing to global warming, fossil fuel power plants that operate with high thermal efficiencies and offer the potential for effective CO2 sequestration can be expected to gain in importance. CO2 sequestration (or carbon capture) will be particularly of great importance for coal-based power plants, and numerous power plant designs based on converting coal to syngas are at various stages of development with the potential for implementing effective carbon capture. To this end, solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) offer a promising approach to convert coal-derived syngas directly to electrical power. They are ideally suited for implementing carbon capture because they pull O2 out of the airflow across a solid oxide ion (O2-) conducting membrane. The fuel oxidation products (CO2 and H2O) are thus separated from dilution by the N2 in the airflow, and the concentrated CO2 and H2O flow is more amenable to effective CO2 sequestration. The potential of SOFCs has led to simulation studies on integrating SOFCs with coal gasification and carbon sequestration for high-efficiency, nearzero-emissions power plants (Dijkstra and Jansen, 2004; Moller et al., 2004; Verma et al., 2006; Araki et al., 2007a; Trembly et al., 2007c). While such centralized SOFCbased power plants operating on coal (or even biomass)-derived syngas still require many years of development effort, assessing SOFCs operation in such future plants with syngas feeds is benefiting from shorter-time-scale implementation of SOFCs operating on syngas from hydrocarbon reformers for small-scale portable and backup power. This chapter will review how SOFCs perform on syngas fuel feeds.
