Adsorbents for CO2 captured with nano silica as support were synthesized by impregnating polyethyleneimine (PEI) into nano silica.

No abstract

Closing the anthropogenic carbon cycle is one important strategy to combat climate change, and requires the chemistry to effectively combine CO2 capture with its conversion. Here, we propose a novel in situ CO2 utilization concept, calcium-looping reforming of methane, to realize the capture and conversion of CO2 in one integrated chemical process. This process couples the calcium-looping CO2 capture and the CH4 dry reforming reactions in the CaO-Ni bifunctional sorbent-catalyst, where the CO2 captured by CaO is reduced in situ by CH4 to CO, a reaction catalyzed by catalyzed by the adjacent metallic Ni. The process coupling scheme exhibits excellent decarbonation kinetics by exploiting Le Chatelier’s principle to shift reaction equilibrium through continuous conversion of CO2, and results in an energy consumption 22% lower than that of conventional CH4 dry reforming for CO2 utilization. The proposed CO2 utilization concept offers a promising option to recycle carbon directly at large CO2 stationary sources in an energy-efficient manner.

No abstract

After carbonization and activation, pine cone shell-based activated carbons were used to adsorb CO2, and presenting a good adsorption performance.

Accounting for ~8% of annual global CO2 emissions, the iron and steel industry is expected to undertake the largest contribution to industrial decarbonisation. Despite the launch of several national and regional programmes for low-carbon steelmaking, the techno-economically feasible options are still lacking. Here, based on the carbon capture and storage (CCS) strategy, we propose a new decarbonisation concept which exploits the inherent potential of the iron and steel industry through calcium-looping lime production. We find that this concept allows steel mills to reach the 2050 decarbonisation target by 2030. Moreover, only this concept is revealed to exhibit a CO2 avoidance cost (12.5–15.8 €2010/t) lower than the projected CO2 trading price in 2020, whilst the other considered options are not expected to be economically feasible until 2030. We conclude that the proposed concept is the best available option for decarbonisation of this industrial sector in the mid- to long-term.

Amine−silica hybrid materials have been investigated extensively in terms of their suitability for postcombustion CO 2 capture. However, research on how the silica types affects the synthesis and performance of amine−silica hybrid materials is scarce. In this study, four types of commonly used and representative silica including precipitated silica, fumed silica, MCM-41, and silica gel are used to synthesize a series of comparable materials by grafting a silane onto them. We undertake a porosity analysis of plain silica and the amine−silica hybrid materials and determined the CO 2 adsorption performance of amine−silica hybrid materials. The results suggest that precipitated silica is a superior and promising support material for amine−silica hybrid materials synthesis by grafting. The amine−silica hybrid material supporting with precipitated silica possesses relatively high amine content, exhibits good porosity, and obtains the highest CO 2 adsorption capacity and amine efficiency compared to those of three other amine−silica hybrid materials.

Capturing anthropogenic CO2 in a cost-effective and highly efficient manner is one of the most challenging issues faced by scientists today. Herein, we report a novel structure-reforming approach to convert steel slag, a cheap, abundant, and nontoxic calcium-rich industrial waste, as the only feedstock into superior CaO-based, self-stabilizing CO2 sorbents. The CO2 capture capacity of all the steel slag-derived sorbents was improved more than 10-fold compared to the raw slag, with the maximum uptake of CO2 achieving at 0.50 gCO2 gsorbent(-1). Additionally, the initial steel slag-derived sorbent could retain 0.25 gCO2 gsorbent(-1), that is, a decay rate of only 12% over 30 carbonation-calcination cycles, the excellent self-stabilizing property allowed it to significantly outperform conventional CaO, and match with most of the existing synthetic CaO-based sorbents. A synergistic effect that facilitated CO2 capture by CaO-based sorbents was clearly recognized when Mg and Al, the most common elements in steel slag, coexisted with CaO in the forms of MgO and Al2O3, respectively. During the calcium looping process, MgO served as a well spacer to increase the porosity of sorbents together with Al2O3 serving as a durable stabilizer to coresist the sintering of CaCO3 grains at high temperatures.