Novel Carbon Capture Technology Development for Power Generation Using Wyoming Coal

Wyoming is the largest producer of coal in the U.S. This coal accounts for nearly half of the U.S. power production. Thus, WY will be greatly affected by anticipated future carbon emissions legislation. Carbon capture and sequestration will be critical to minimize the cost burden incurred on power generation facilities due to carbon emissions. Existing industry standard CO2 separation technologies are too costly for large scale implementation. Hence, two novel technological pathways are proposed here. The first proposed technology is targeted at substantial improvement in coal conversion efficiency relative to conventional coal combustion technologies using chemical looping combustion (CLC) and subsequent production of sequestration ready nearly pure CO2. In this work, a CLC process using solid oxygen carrier will be developed for Wyoming coal. In the CLC process an oxygen carrier transfers oxygen from air to the fuel in a reducing chamber for combustion. Since no N2 is introduced for combustion, unlike conventional coal combustion technologies, nearly pure CO2 is produced. As part of this work extensive fundamental characterization and optimum process condition determination on the lab scale will be conducted to identify suitable oxygen carriers and process conditions for CLC using Wyoming coal. The second proposed technology is targeted at development of novel Ionic Liquid (IL)- based solid sorbents for energy efficient CO2 capture from existing power plants using Wyoming coal. ILs are promising materials for CO2 capture due to accessible low regeneration energies, low volatilities, and high CO2 selectivities and capacities. However, their industrial implementation is hampered by their high viscosities leading to high pumping costs, slow sorption kinetics and inefficient heat transfer. In the proposed work, we will develop novel scalable methods for ILbased sorbent particle fabrication with optimum physical characteristics to exploit the advantageous characteristics of ILs for CO2 capture.