The concept

Why waste heat?

Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) and Waste Heat to Power (WH2P) are well established best practices helping industries to decrease their energetic dependency on fossil fuels and improving their resource efficiency.

While WHR is widely used for internal industrial purposes, WH2P applications are prevented from widespread use by numerous barriers. In particular, their significant size, limited technological competitiveness (>20 MWth, limited WH temperature, lower efficiencies) and flammable fluids still represent serious bottlenecks.

Why sCO2?

Use of CO2 in its supercritical state is revolutionary and very promising in power generation. It offers benefits of both states – it expands as a gas and it’s dense as a liquid. These unique thermodynamic properties make its use ideal for power conversion in a turbine.

Thanks to the sCO2 power cycles characteristics (flexibility, significant water reduction up to 100%, smaller components’ size and no GHG emissions), they offset the disadvantages of the traditional solutions and make them an ideal technology for REIIs.

Recuperated closed-loop Brayton cycle with sCO2 as a working fluid will be used in the CO2OLHEAT project:

CO2OLHEAT project will

  • contribute to the industries’ energy efficiency improvement and GHG emissions reduction
  • mitigate the electricity consumption increase
  • introduce the concept of circular economy and industrial symbiosis in heat management

Capitalising on the Consortium Partners’ relevant expertise and experience gained in other sCO2-related EU-funded projects, CO2OLHEAT will develop and demonstrate in a high Technology Readiness Level (TRL 7) a 2MW sCO2 power block integrated in a cement plant in the Czech Republic.

This power block will valorise the industrial waste heat at T>400˚C and the project will further study this concept for upscale and replication in other REIIs as well as power generation.

Flag of Europe This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N° 101022831