Biogas upgrading through calcium looping: Experimental validation and study of CO2 capture

The calcium looping technology is one of the most promising technologies for capturing and storing CO2. This technology has been evaluated with a variety of sorbents and conditions in previous works, but the inlet CO2- ladden gas has typically been a flue gas from combustion, which typically has a composition of 10-20% CO2 and 80-90% N2. On the other side, the performance of the calcium looping process for CO2 capture of other gases (i. e., biogas or gases resulting from hydrothermal carbonization) remains largely unstudied. In this work, this knowledge gap is assessed through evaluating the performance of the calcium looping process for biogas (syn-thesized as 40% CO2, 60% CH4) in terms of carbonation conversion. This experimental study investigates the impact of: (1) using an inlet gas composition representative for biogas instead of combustion flue gas; (2) different biogas compositions; (3) the carbonation temperature; (4) the cooling-down and heating-up of the sorbent material between the reactor and ambient temperatures within cycles; (5) the atmosphere composition during calcination; and (6) the solids particle size. The main result obtained is that the overall CO2-capture performance of calcium looping improves when using biogas as inlet CO2-ladden gas, in comparison with combustion flue gas. One main contribution to this improved performance is shown to be the presence of sec-ondary reactions (i.e., dry reforming, methanation). The impact of the CH4 to CO2 ratio tested is not remarkable, showing that the potentialities of the process in this aspect can be adapted to several biogas producing feedstocks.

Automated summary

The calcium looping technology is a promising method for CO2 capture and storage. Previous studies have focused on evaluating this technology using combustion flue gas, while little is known about its performance when capturing CO2 from biogas or gases resulting from hydrothermal carbonization. This experimental study assesses the performance of calcium looping for biogas and finds improved CO2-capture performance compared to combustion flue gas.