Coal-powered power plant is one of the largest producers of energy for general

public in the world. In Malaysia, coal-powered power plant generated around

70% of the total energy produced. In peninsular Malaysia alone there are

One main problem with coal-powered power plant is that it produces a lot of
greenhouse gas. Researches have been conducted to reduce the amount of
greenhouse gas released to the air. Advancement of technology in this field has
led to the develop of new technology that could reduce the amount of
greenhouse gas release to the atmosphere that is by using an alternate boiler
such as circulating fluidized bed boiler, supercritical boiler, ultra supercritical
boiler, and gasification process among other.

In Malaysia, subcritical pulverized coal plants are the most used type of coal-
powered power plant. In term of power generation, it is hard to justify the need
to upgrade subcritical boiler to a supercritical or ultra supercritical boiler
because the energy generated will be the same as the energy produced is related
to the energy content of the coal and not the boiler, however, in term of
environmental impact, supercritical and ultra supercritical boiler were found to
released less carbon dioxide due to higher efficiency. In this era, engineers are
more environmentally friendly than it was 50 years or more years ago. As such,
some government is pushing toward a zero carbon footprint in the whole
country. This theoretically is impossible, even if power generation depends
solely on nuclear or any other renewable energy, other everyday life carbon
emission such as from transportation exhaust, incinerator, production of carbon
compound will still emit greenhouse gases. The government of Malaysia also has
followed through on the call to reduce the carbon dioxide emission when the
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak announced at the United Nation
Climate Change Conference 2009 at Copenhagen, that Malaysia will reduce its
carbon dioxide emission by up to 40% no later than 2020.

Supercritical and ultra super critical boiler use the principle of operating the
power plant at a very high pressure that is higher than the critical pressure of
steam. Even though the theory of supercritical steam has been around for a long
time, however, to sustain it industry was hard before as at the time there were
no material that could reliably withstand these conditions. As such, development
of metallurgy needs to be taken account when increasing the operating pressure
and temperature of a boiler. The advantage of using a higher operating pressure
is to increase the thermodynamic efficiency of the Rankine cycle. A standard
large subcritical thermal power plant operate at an efficiency of 38% while
supercritical and ultra supercritical has a range of efficiency of 42% and 44%
respectively this at pressure of 170 bar, 250 bar and 300 bar respectively. As
mention above, due to the higher efficiency, this would lead to a reduction of
carbon dioxide emission. Supercritical boiler has becoming a norm in coal-
powered power generation plant and country like China is now pushing for an
ultra supercritical power plant, however, in Malaysia we are far behind, the first
supercritical power plant was built in 2014 with a capacity of 1000 MW. This
power plant was slated to be able to power nearly 2 million households in
Malaysia.
Another new technology that comes into the spotlight is the circulating fluidized
bed (CFB). This new technology is a clean process with the ability to achieve
lower emission of pollutants. Most of the pollutant could be absorbed before
being exposed to the atmosphere. Not only carbon dioxide emission is reduced
but, the circulating fluidized bed also able to control the emission of SOx and NOx
gases. The demand of CFB has increases recently in European and the United
State of America due to the tighter emission standard set by the environmental
protection agency when The Mercury and Air Toxic Standards (MATS) were
enacted in 2011. The circulating fluidized bed utilize an upstream jets of air on
the incoming solid fuels to improve the mixing of the compound for better heat
transfer and chemical reaction. It also employs a very high temperature of 700 ℃
to 1000 ℃. This is to prevent the formation of nitrogen oxides. Furthermore,
instead of using a separate scrubber to absorb sulfur, limestone or dolomite is
mix together during the fluidization stage, which can absorb up to 95% of the
sulfur pollutants. Few limitation of CFB is that it is expensive and a single unit is
limited to 400 MW compare to the ultra supercritical boiler that could generate
up to 1200 MW. However, certain company like Alstom has a unit that could
generate up to 660 MW.

The most popular new technology is the coal gasification. Although there is no
industry scale power plant that is using a gasification process yet in the world,
the closest one to achieve this is Japan that is in the process of building the first
coal gasification power plant. Coal gasification process is a process of producing
syngas that consist of mainly methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, carbon
dioxide and water vapor from coal and water. By firing gas instead of coal into
the boiler, the efficiency of the combustion could largely be improve and thus
reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emitted to the environment. However,
the downside of getting into a coal gasification industry is that it is largely new
technology with little to no history on industry scale. The other limitation is that
the capacity would be lower and very expensive due to the a lot of machinery
needed such as scrubber and carbon capture to further reduce the emission
released by the plant.

Carbon captures and storage has long been involved in the power generation
industry. The idea is to capture was carbon dioxide from large sources such as
power plants and transport it to a storage site, usually an underground site. This
in turn will lead to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that enter the
atmosphere, hence mitigating the effect of global warming from fossil fuel such
natural gas and coal. Large commercial scale of carbon capture project has been
around since 2000 located in Midale, Canada. The problem with carbon capture
program is that it is not widely acceptable by the general population and it also
reduced the efficiency of the power plant, since between 10% to 40% of the
energy produced by a power station is used to capture the carbon. This will lead
to more coal being fired into the boiler to meet the energy demand by the grid. A
higher energy price could be the outcome from this as well to cover the carbon
capture investment and the increase in the amount of coal needed to sufficiently
generate electricity to meet the customer demand.