Scale and Regionality of Nonelectric Markets for U.S. Nuclear Light Water Reactors
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
INL/EXT-20-57885 Revision 0 Scale and Regionality of Nonelectric Markets for U.S. Nuclear Light Water Reactors L. Todd Knighton, Daniel Wendt, Abdalla Jaoude, Cristian Rabiti, and Richard Boardman (INL), Amgad Elgowainy, Krishna Reddi, and Adarsh Bafana (ANL), Brian D. James, Brian Murphy, Julia Scheerer, and Fred Peterson (Strategic Analysis) March 2020 The INL is a U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Battelle Energy Alliance DISCLAIMER This information was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the U.S. Government. Neither the U.S. Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, expressed or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness, of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. References herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trade mark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the U.S. Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the U.S. Government or any agency thereof. INL/EXT-20-57885 Scale and Regionality of Nonelectric Markets for U.S. Nuclear Light Water Reactors L. Todd Knighton, Daniel Wendt, Abdalla Jaoude, Cristian Rabiti, and Richard Boardman (INL), Amgad Elgowainy, Krishna Reddi, and Adarsh Bafana (ANL), Brian D. James, Brian Murphy, Julia Scheerer, and Fred Peterson (Strategic Analysis) March 2020 Idaho National Laboratory Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415 http://www.inl.gov Prepared Under DOE Idaho Operations Office Contract DE-AC07-05ID14517 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Nuclear energy is increasingly being recognized as a valuable low-carbon, low-emissions energy source that can help meet clean energy targets being set by states, commissions, and utilities in the United States. Currently, nuclear power provides about one-fifth of the country’s electricity. Nuclear power plants (NPPs) further provide the grid with all-weather season-long baseload capacity that is important to grid reliability and resiliency. An innovative revenue model that has been proposed for U.S. LWRs is to alternatively use the heat and electricity from nuclear reactors to produce in- demand industrial products—hydrogen for use in fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV), cofiring with natural gas (NG), petroleum and biofuel refining, ammonia production, direct-reduced iron (DRI) for steel production, and synthetic fuels (synfuels) and chemicals (synchems) such as methanol, polymers, formic acid, and others—via thermal and electrochemical processes during seasonal and daily periods of low grid-electricity market pricing (overgeneration) in lieu of being curtailed or producing electricity to the grid at a less-than-optimal electricity price. Repurposing NPPs to flexibly produce nonelectric products and clean-energy carriers could help alleviate the economic pressure on NPPs and enable decarbonization of the power sector, as well as the transportation and industrial sectors. This study takes an in-depth look into various regions interest (Figure ES1) representing a variety of operating markets, local generation mix, and seasonal climates within the U.S. near existing LWR facilities to identify the scale, location, and accessibility of a wide variety of candidate industrial-product markets, as well as their feedstocks as applicable—for example CO2, as a feedstock to synfuels or formic acid production—that could be accessed by producing these products using the heat and electricity from nuclear reactors. Both current and future market opportunities surrounding these nuclear plants were investigated. Regions were selected where nuclear operating utilities such as Exelon, Xcel Energy, Harbor Energy, Arizona Public Service, Duke Energy, and Southern Company are currently considering nonelectric product possibilities. Other interested utilities and the topics of possible future studies include Nebraska Public Power District and Wolf Creek Operating Corporation. This study shows a large variety of product opportunities open to nuclear plants as they diversify their offerings in addition to producing grid electricity. Electricity capacity markets are also discussed because they reward large and reliable generators, such as nuclear plants, that are able to guarantee all- weather/all-season capacity and are important in the mix of alternate revenue sources that will help these nuclear plants to remain profitable and sustainable. Also presented is a sample analysis of the economics of hydrogen production in the Minnesota area, considering the capital and operating costs of the hydrogen plant as well as local market demand for hydrogen. i Figure ES1: Regions of study for this report NPP operators are presented with diverse market options to consider in order to optimize their revenue by economically dispatching electricity either to the grid or to the production of industrial products, fuels, and chemicals. The objectives of this study include: • Provide U.S. NPP operators a robust sampling of the market demand location, scale, and accessibility (including storage and transportation) of the wide variety of industrial-product choices that could be produced using thermal nuclear energy and electricity in proximity to a subset of U.S. NPPs to inform the industry of the potential opportunity • Show examples and trade-off analyses of how U.S. LWR operators can access these markets, including storage and transportation of industrial products to their intended markets • Present a general analytic example for one industrial product (i.e., hydrogen) in one region (the Minnesota area), including production, storage, and transportation, to show how nuclear-hybrid integrated energy systems (IESs) could access local markets and improve the profitability of a NPP. It is envisioned that, in the near future, large industrial processes—such as metals refineries, and synfuels and polymers production plants—may choose to advantageously collocate and closely couple with the heat and electricity generated by NPPs in order to fully realize the advantages and synergies of nuclear-hybrid IESs. By collocating industrial-process plants near NPPs, large amounts of thermal and electrical energy produced by a nuclear plant can be efficiently and locally used to produce transportable fungible products such as refined metals and steels, synfuels, polymers, ammonia, formic acid, and others onsite. This report focuses heavily on direct demand for hydrogen and its use in making other products and chemicals such as DRI for steel production, ammonia and fertilizers, and synfuels etc). Demand for other products such as oxygen, formic acid, polymers and other applications are briefly discussed. An update to demand applications for heat from NPPs to form an energy park as well as more ii in-depth studies of synfuels and chemicals such as methanol coupling with NPPs will be the subjects of future studies. A separate future study will also present analysis of the national discussion around creating a clean energy credit system for electricity and non-electric products produced using nuclear energy and propose various methods for doing so. This report begins a library of information on the demand market for nonelectric industrial products in these regions. It can inform decisions on the timing and scale of nonelectric product pilot and commercial scale demonstrations for each region. Companies’ internal as well as local and state regulator decarbonization targets will play a role in these decisions. The level of clean energy and carbon emissions reduction targets for each organization may highlight additional incentives to couple nonelectric products with NPPs. As expected, carbon emissions lifecycle analyses (LCA) summarized in this report show that using nuclear power instead of fossil fuels to make these industrial products drastically reduces CO2 emissions. Nonelectric product demand data (as presented in this report) is just one dataset needed when doing rigorous modeling in technoeconomic analysis (TEA). Other inputs such as specific electricity grid demand and structure, NPP and nonelectric product process modeling and economic parameters, etc will be collected in future specific TEAs. Individual specific TEAs have been completed for two nuclear plant locations, one for Harbor Energy (Davis-Besse) and one for Exelon (Braidwood). Future TEAs to be completed include Xcel Energy and Arizona Public Service (APS) and others in the future as interest applies. These rigorous TEAs provide modeling results specific to the NPP operator, location, and chosen nonelectric process technology to show the options, configuration, and operating strategies with the most probable success and highest financial and environmental incentives for each location. iii Contents 1. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................... 1 2. INDUSTRIAL PROCESS AND PRODUCT MARKETS OF STUDY ............................................. 4 2.1 Overview of Electricity Capacity Markets .................................................................. 4 2.1.1 Analysis of NPP-Associated Facilities and Capacity Markets .................................... 7 2.2 Electrolysis: Hydrogen and Oxygen Markets ............................................................