A global molten carbonate fuel cells (MCFC) power plant steady-state simulation is presented. A performance fuel cell numerical model is developed and integrated as a custom block in Aspen plus(TM) for the whole process simulation. The burner/reformer compact unit is built assembling existing Aspen plus(TM) internal blocks. A simulation is obtained with the preliminary input specification to get to the base case and a sensitivity analysis is conducted, in order to find the process parameters whose change improves the global efficiency. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.