SEOUL, July 20 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s steel giant POSCO announced on Monday that in collaboration with power plant builder Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co., it will develop a new power generation technology using the ammonia synthesized from green and blue hydrogen as a fuel.
The two parties, together with the Research Institute of Industrial Science and Technology, will jointly develop power generation technology that operates a turbine by combusting the hydrogen created through the decomposition of ammonia.
To overcome the limitations of ammonia, which features a low combustion speed and heating value, the three parties opted to dissolve it into hydrogen and nitrogen through a cracker and then combust it to operate a gas turbine instead.
Combusting hydrogen and nitrogen gases results in substantially higher combustion speeds and heating values compared to the method of combusting ammonia itself.
The three parties will also develop technology to collect heat from the exhaust gases generated during the combustion stage and inject it back into the cracker to increase the heat value of the gas as well as to improve the power generation efficiency.
If ammonia as a mixture with liquefied natural gas (LNG) in a calorific ratio of 20 percent is combusted, carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by about 20 percent compared to generating power from LNG alone.
Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)