Transport Through Porous Media: Case Studies of CO2 Sequestration, CO2-Oxygen Reaction in Oxy-Combustion, and Oxygen Transport in Membrane at High Temperatures

Abstract

Global warming and climate change have been linked to man-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions due to the correlation between raised global surface temperatures and increased ambient CO2 concentrations during the last century. The man-made CO2 emissions are primarily from burning of fossil fuels for A. Xiang (*) Chemical Engineering Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: xaishuang@gmail.com # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 W.-Y. Chen et al. (eds.), Handbook of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-6431-0_76-1 1 energy production and transportation. To limit the emissions, CO2 sequestration has been applied to inject CO2 into various deep surface formations after capturing CO2 from the flue gases. The topic of transport through porous media in this chapter is to summarize investigations of migration of CO2 after sequestration, gas transport through coal particles during oxy-combustion, and oxygen transport in membranes during air separation. A general mechanism has been provided first in the introduction to briefly explain transport through porous media. The following sections, respectively, include a general review of recent literatures on the subjects of CO2 migration after sequestration, CO2-oxygen transport in oxy-combustion, and oxygen transport in membrane at high temperatures. Understanding the fundamental mechanisms and processes of the transport through porous media allows mathematical models to be used to evaluate and optimize the performance and design of these systems.