Chemical Looping Combustion of Coal in China: Comprehensive Progress, Remaining Challenges, and Potential Opportunities

Chemical looping combustion (CLC) has emerged as an efficient and promising combustion technique for fossil fuels during the past few decades. The main advantages of CLC lie in its inherent CO2 sequestration and cascade energy utilization, being primarily benefited from the in situ reactive separation facilitated by the circulation of a solid intermediate. Up to date, the research on the CLC-related oxygen carrier, reactor, and system has made extensive and in-depth development worldwide. CLC units with thermal power ranging from the kWth to MWth scale were demonstrated with fuels of different types (gaseous, liquid, and solid fuels). Over the past 20 years, Chinese researchers have made significant progress in chemical looping technologies, extending from fundamental oxygen carrier studies to the implementation of pilot-scale CLC units. For the use of solid fuels, such as coal, in CLC, it is a rather challenging task but a lot of opportunities also remain. As a result of the particular "rich coal, meager oil, and deficient gas" energy reserve characteristics, China has become the main research battlefield on CLC of coal these years. In this paper, the main advances and research status on CLC of coal in China are reviewed and appraised. The contents in this paper cover most of, if not all, the research hotspots on CLC of coal, i.e., oxygen carrier screening, reactor design/construction/operation, pollutant emission, reaction kinetics, and numerical simulation. Chinese researchers have made substantial contributions to two bottleneck issues faced by the coal-derived CLC technique, i.e., developing and preparing a low-cost while well-performing oxygen carrier and promoting the slow char gasification process in the fuel reactor. In addition, remaining challenges that constrain the development of large-scale CLC units and indeed deserve in-depth investigation are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the following three key challenges: severe mismatch of reaction rates in CLC of coal, difficulty in attaining a good balance between the oxygen carrier performance and cost, and challenge in controlling solid circulation to manage heat and mass transfer. Accordingly, potential opportunities for future research and scaling-up of the coal-derived CLC technique are discussed. The academic thoughts that are highlighted here include (1) achieving a good compromise between the oxygen carrier cost and performance through the rational design of a multifunctional and composite oxygen carrier and its scalable preparation using cheap raw materials, (2) coordination among reactor modeling–reactor design–reactor operation to attain effective management of heat and mass transfer in the CLC reactor, and (3) a complex while effective matching matrix among coal type, oxygen carrier particle, and reactor configuration to acquire the optimal performance of the whole CLC system. Overall, this review summarizes the contributions of Chinese scholars to CLC of coal and presents how these research achievements benefit the commercial-scale demonstration of this technique. With the continuing research inputs into the coal-derived CLC technique, remaining bottleneck issues can be tackled and commercial application of this technique is very probable in the very near future. On this occasion, we stress one point in particular, that the successful commercial demonstration of CLC of coal requires deep participation and strong support of industrial sectors, both technically and financially.