Clean fossil fuel heat and power plants - General information

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CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels

Natural gas (mainly methane), oil and coal are fossil fuels suitable for power generation with CO₂ capture. As shown in Table 1, the various fuels have different proportion between hydrogen and carbon atoms, and have different heating values. Based on these properties CO₂ emission per kWh electricity can be graphed as a function of power plant electric efficiency, see Figure 1.

	Methane	Destilate Oil	Brown Coal	Hard Coal
C/H	4.0	2.0	0.2	0.1
LHV [MJ/kg]	50	42	15	32

Table 1: Properties of various fossil fuels.

Figure 1 shows that CO₂ emission per kWh electricity is larger for coal than for distillate oil and for methane at a given electric efficiency.

Electric efficiency is in general lower for coal fired power plants compared to natural gas fired power plants. New coal power plants in Europe, without CO₂ capture, have electric efficiency around 40-45 %, while existing plants in Europe lies about 35 %. New combined cycle natural gas power plants have electric efficiencies around 55-60 %.

Figure 1: CO₂ emissions versus electrical efficiency for different fossil fuels.

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