(225h) Application of Bi-Functional Catalytic Sorbents for Carbon Capture and High-Purity Hydrogen Production.

Global warming is a significant problem caused by the continuous release of carbon dioxide resulting from burning fossil fuels. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is proposed as a mid-term solution to mitigate this issue. However, the high cost of the carbon dioxide capture/separation step poses a significant challenge to the commercialization of the CCS process. Calcium-looping (CaL) technology, which utilizes calcium oxide-based adsorbents, has emerged as a promising method to capture carbon dioxide at high temperatures. Although calcium oxide-based adsorbents have a high theoretical carbon dioxide sorption capacity, cyclic sorption capacity decreases significantly with repeated adsorption/regeneration cycles due to their low thermal stability. Incorporating thermally stable and inert materials has been known to improve the structural stability of calcium oxide-based adsorbents. The objective of this study was to enhance the stability and ensure the catalytic activity of calcium-oxide-based catalytic sorbents for sorption-enhanced steam methane reforming (SE-SMR). To achieve this, zirconium was added as a stabilizer, and nickel was included as a catalyst in the calcium oxide-based sorbents. The study evaluated the performance of the bi-functional catalytic sorbents by measuring their carbon dioxide sorption uptake and hydrogen production efficiency.