Chemical Looping Technology and Its Fossil Energy Conversion Applications

Abstract

The concept of chemical looping reactions has been widely applied in chemical industries, for example, the production of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) from hydrogen and oxygen using 9,10-anthraquinone as the looping intermediate. Fundamental research on chemical looping reactions has also been applied to energy systems, for example, the splitting of water (H2O) to produce oxygen and hydrogen using ZnO as the looping intermediate. Fossil fuel chemical looping applications had been used commercially with the steam-iron process for coal from the 1900s to the 1940s and had been demonstrated at a pilot scale with the carbon dioxide acceptor process in the 1960s and 1970s. There are presently no chemical looping processes using fossil fuels in commercial operation. A key factor that hampered the continued use of these earlier processes for fossil energy operation was the inadequacy of the reactivity and recyclability of the looping particles. This factor led to higher costs for product generation using the chemical ...