(318b) Large-Scale Removal of Atmospheric CO2 through Biomass Chemical Looping Combustion

Global climate change is understood to result largely from CO₂ emissions from combustion of fossil fuels. Several types of technologies are under development to minimize emissions of carbon dioxide, including post-combustion CO₂ scrubbing, oxy-fuel combustion, gasification with CO₂ capture and chemical looping combustion. Several studies indicate that chemical looping combustion has the lowest energy penalty and impact on cost of electricity. Consequently, interest in chemical looping combustion is increasing and today many groups around the world are researching the technology at lab and pilot scale. Most of this research focuses on coal or natural gas as fuels, since capturing fossil CO₂ for sequestration has the potential to make these fuels CO₂ neutral. However, if biomass is used as a fuel, carbon capture technologies make removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere possible, i.e. the process becomes carbon negative. This presentation discusses the development of chemical looping combustion technology and the potential for large-scale removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere by using biomass as a “CO₂ filter” and sequestering the concentrated CO₂ product resulting from chemical looping combustion.