Assessment of a novel concept for co-generation of heat and power

The vision behind this thesis is to address anthropogenic climate change through the mitigation of VAM from gassy underground coal mines. To fulfil this vision, the thesis aimed at the development and assessment of process layouts that recover the process heat from fluidised bed based VAM abatement reactors. The research, in particular, focused on identifying the minimum methane concentration for both VAM abatement and power generation. This was to establish under what operating conditions a typical plant was self-sustaining, that is, when the heat that was recovered met the power requirements of the plant. Similarly, knowledge of the minimum methane concentration enabled the establishment of the required external source of power (e.g. a grid-connected supply) or supplementary fuel when the methane concentration in the ventilation air dropped below the minimum methane concentration. A financial evaluation was also an important objective of this work, where the economic feasibility of the selected fluidised bed based VAM abatement processes.