Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is broadly recognised as having the potential to play a key role in meeting climate change targets, delivering low carbon heat and power, decarbonising industry and, more recently, its ability to facilitate the net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. However, despite this broad consensus and its technical maturity, CCS has not yet been deployed on a scale commensurate with the ambitions articulated a decade ago. Thus, in this paper we review the current state-of-the-art of CO2 capture, transport, utilisation and storage from a multi-scale perspective, moving from the global to molecular scales. In light of the COP21 commitments to limit warming to less than 2 °C, we extend the remit of this study to include the key negative emissions technologies (NETs) of bioenergy with CCS (BECCS), and direct air capture (DAC). Cognisant of the non-technical barriers to deploying CCS, we reflect on recent experience from the UK's CCS commercialisation programme and consider the commercial and political barriers to the large-scale deployment of CCS. In all areas, we focus on identifying and clearly articulating the key research challenges that could usefully be addressed in the coming decade.

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Carbon capture and storage (CCS): the way forward

This review provides a comprehensive assessment of recently improved carbon dioxide (CO2) separation and capture systems, used in power plants and other industrial processes. Different approaches for CO2 capture are pre-combustion, post-combustion capture, and oxy-combustion systems, which are reviewed, along with their advantages and disadvantages. New technologies and prospective “breakthrough technologies”, for instance: novel solvents, sorbents, and membranes for gas separation are examined. Other technologies including chemical looping technology (reaction between metal oxides and fuels, creating metal particles, carbon dioxide, and water vapor) and cryogenic separation processes (based on different phase change temperatures for various gases to separate them) are reviewed as well. Furthermore, the major CO2 separation technologies, such as absorption (using a liquid solvent to absorb the CO2), adsorption (using solid materials with surface affinity to CO2 molecules), and membranes (using a thin film to selectively permeate gases) are extensively discussed, though issues and technologies related to CO2 transport and storage are not considered in this paper.

Review of recent advances in carbon dioxide separation and capture

A review of research progress on CO2 capture, storage, and utilization in Chinese Academy of Sciences

Comprehensive review of methane conversion in solid oxide fuel cells: Prospects for efficient electricity generation from natural gas

Dense ceramic oxygen permeable membranes and catalytic membrane reactors

Fossil fuels provide a significant fraction of the global energy resources, and this is likely to remain so for several decades. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have been correlated with climate change, and carbon capture is essential to enable the continuing use of fossil fuels while reducing the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere thereby mitigating global climate changes. Among the proposed methods of CO2 capture, oxyfuel combustion technology provides a promising option, which is applicable to power generation systems. This technology is based on combustion with pure oxygen (O2) instead of air, resulting in flue gas that consists mainly of CO2 and water (H2O), that latter can be separated easily via condensation, while removing other contaminants leaving pure CO2 for storage. However, fuel combustion in pure O2 results in intolerably high combustion temperatures. In order to provide the dilution effect of the absent nitrogen (N2) and to moderate the furnace/combustor temperatures, part of the flue gas is recycled back into the combustion chamber. An efficient source of O2 is required to make oxy-combustion a competitive CO2 capture technology. Conventional O2 production utilizing the cryogenic distillation process is energetically expensive. Ceramic membranes made from mixed ion-electronic conducting oxides have received increasing attention because of their potential to mitigate the cost of O2 production, thus helping to promote these clean energy technologies. Some effort has also been expended in using these membranes to improve the performance of the O2 separation processes by combining air separation and high-temperature oxidation into a single chamber. This paper provides a review of the performance of combustors utilizing oxy-fuel combustion process, materials utilized in ion-transport membranes and the integration of such reactors in power cycles. The review is focused on carbon capture potential, developments of oxyfuel applications and O2 separation and combustion in membrane reactors. The recent developments in oxyfuel power cycles are discussed focusing on the main concepts of manipulating exergy flows within each cycle and the reported thermal efficiencies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A review of recent developments in carbon capture utilizing oxy‐fuel combustion in conventional and ion transport membrane systems

Ion transport membrane reactors for oxy-combustion – Part I: intermediate-fidelity modeling

Ion transport membrane reactors for oxy-combustion–Part II: Analysis and comparison of alternatives

Ion transport
 membrane (ITM)-based oxy-combustion systems could potentially provide zero-emissions power generation with a significantly reduced thermodynamic penalty compared to conventional carbon capture applications. This article investigates ITM-based oxy-combustion power cycles using an intermediate-fidelity model that captures the complex physical coupling between the two systems and accurately accounts for operational constraints. Coupled ITM-cycle simulation reveals hidden design challenges, facilitates the development of novel cycle concepts, and enables accurate assessment of new and existing power cycles. Simulations of various ITM-based zero and partial-emissions power cycles are performed using an intermediate-fidelity ITM model coupled to power cycle models created in ASPEN Plus®. The objectives herein are to analyze the prevalent ITM-based power cycle designs, develop novel design modifications, and evaluate the implementation of reactive ITMs. An assessment of the potential for these ITM power cycles to reduce both the thermodynamic penalty and reactor size associated with ITM air separation technology is conducted. The power cycle simulation and analysis demonstrate the various challenges associated with implementing reactive ITMs; hybridization (the use of both reactive and separation-only ITMs) is necessary in order to effectively utilize the advantages of reactive ITMs. The novel hybrid cycle developed herein displays the potential to reduce the size of the ITM compared to the best separation-only concept while maintaining a comparable First Law efficiency. Next, the merit of implementing partial-emissions cycles is explored based on a proposed linear-combination metric. The results indicate that the tradeoff between the main thermodynamic performance metrics efficiency and CO2 emissions does not appear to justify the use of partial-emissions cycles.

N. D. Mancini

Papers

A review of recent developments in carbon capture utilizing oxy‐fuel combustion in conventional and ion transport membrane systems

Ion transport membrane reactors for oxy-combustion – Part I: intermediate-fidelity modeling

Ion transport membrane reactors for oxy-combustion–Part II: Analysis and comparison of alternatives

Conceptual design and analysis of ITM oxy-combustion power cycles.

Optimal design and operation of membrane-based oxy-combustion power plants