About the project
RESTORE aims to develop a very efficient combined heat and power system for flare gas, by implementing a hybrid cycle combining a micro gas turbine and a SOFC, to avoid flaring while still enabling the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions through carbon capturing. The RESTORE system involves 4 key components:
- A steam reformer (SR) to convert the flare gas into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (CO) which can be consumed by the fuel cell and which exploits part of the heat produced by the SOFC and oxy-combustor (OC).
- A Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) operating at high temperature to produce electricity and heat
- A recuperated microturbine (MGT) equipped with an oxygen-nitrogen separation membrane unit capable of supplying air to the SOFC and oxygen to an oxy-combustor (OC) for burning the fuel not converted in the anode of the SOFC
- A carbon capturing unit (CC) which will condense water from the CO2 dense exhaust flue gas of the SOFC and OC and recover CO2 for recycling, storage and further conversion into other useful products.
The main objective of RESTORE will be to design and demonstrate the functioning of the system at TRL 5 level on 3 selected flare gas compositions of interest for the petrochemical industry. An industrial committee involving several large industries or federations will be organized with the aim of guaranteeing that the project objectives and system specifications are well aligned with industry needs. Target electrical power for the final product system is 250 kWe which is representative of relatively small flares combustion power. To limit the project cost, the power of the project demonstrator is however limited to a lower value (25-30 kWe, power to be confirmed based on final SOFC stack cost) which will still be sufficiently representative of the target product. The project indeed aims to be a demonstration of the concept and upon successful completion, the power capacity of the technologies (SR, SOFC, MGT, OC, CCU) can be extended to produce a system of 250kWe which then represents an appropriate building block for industry wide deployment since all main technical barriers will have been overcome.
