Introduction, 2nd Edition

In this second edition, the single largest factor that is responsible for added material is technology that accommodates a wider range of fuels and fuel parameters in gas turbines (GTs) and gas turbine (including steam turbine) cycles. GTs are now on the verge of adopting coal as a fuel, as syngas in an integrated gasification combustion cycle (IGCC). Novel fuel technology has been around for decades, sometimes out of sheer necessity (as far back as the RAF using bunker fuel instead of light diesel during the Falklands war), but it’s the degree of expanding success in this vein that is noteworthy. Some GTs can handle biomass. Others have been modified to burn low BTU process gas or waste fuels.

The size of the GT powerplant has been steadily growing. A GTCC is not quite in the size league of the largest steam plants yet, but it’s growing.

The world has been on a roller coaster economy for about two decades now. The aviation business has been hard hit. GT owners are keener to keep their GT components for longer than their stated lives and their GTs for even longer. Overhaul and repair, as well as performance optimization, continue to develop.

In the last decade, the gas industry forges ahead with fracking. This drops the price of gas dramatically, making the development of IGCC technologies less vital, but politics, labor markets, and low gas resources in many poorer countries insist that coal as a fuel (in GTs or otherwise) must continue to develop. Emissions concerns prompt the development of carbon capture and sequestration. Carbon emissions can be “turned around” as carbon credits and then traded or taxed.

Technology is now accessible enough that power can be made in ever smaller distributed packages: microturbines, with or without fuel cells, solar, wind, wave, tide generators, hybrids of all of them, some of which include small (micro) gas turbines. Ironically, even as small users develop options with respect to their own energy independence, large power continues to grow. Metallurgy improves to accommodate ultra supercritical steam, not just supercritical steam, helping coal rich countries with no gas, to avoid paying heavy premiums for imported oil and LNG: thus the steam turbine business continues to rival the gas turbine sector.

Support technologies like smart grids and smart materials play their part. New grid technology helps renewables become a contender, albeit smaller than fossil fuel plants. Smart materials will slowly transform manufacture.

At last, there is widespread recognition, even among stubborn politicians, that emissions need to be mitigated, so carbon-capture and sequestration updates are a larger part of this second edition. This is one of the strongest areas of international cooperation, within the EU, in the Americas and Asia and increasingly, across everyone’s oceans. Reduced emissions generally also mean not just maximized fuel efficiency, but longer times between overhauls. That was not always a connection made by all.