Carbon capture and utilization via chemical looping dry reforming

Abstract Chemical looping combustion (CLC) is a clean energy technology for CO 2 capture that uses periodic oxidation and reduction of an oxygen carrier with air and a fuel, respectively, to achieve flameless combustion and yield sequestration-ready CO 2 streams. While CLC allows for highly efficient CO 2 capture, it does not, however, provide a solution for CO 2 sequestration. Here, we propose chemical looping dry reforming (CLDR) as an alternative to CLC by replacing air with CO 2 as the oxidant. CLDR extends the chemical looping principle to achieve CO 2 reduction to CO, which opens a pathway to CO 2 utilization as an alternative to sequestration. The feasibility of CLDR is studied through thermodynamic screening calculations for oxygen carrier selection, synthesis and kinetic experiments of nanostructured carriers using cyclic thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and fixed-bed reactor studies, and a brief model-based analysis of the thermal aspects of a fixed-bed CLDR process. Overall, our results indicate that it is indeed possible to reduce CO 2 to CO with high reaction rates through the use of appropriately designed nanostructured carriers, and to integrate this reaction into a cyclic redox (“looping”) process.