Development of an innovative Gas Turbine Chemical Looping Combustor for Carbon Negative Power Generation

Climate Change is the major global challenge of this century, with significant ramifications on human life. Unfortunately it is unlikely that agreed climate targets can be met without removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Negative Emissions Technologies are needed.

The specific objective of the current project is thus to develop a carbon negative technology which can produce power and heat at low cost and which can be implemented rapidly.

Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) of biofuels (such as: pyrolysis oils, biogas, solid biomass) can be such a process and is the basis of the project.

Biomass absorbs CO2 during growth and releases it when burnt; but if CO2 is captured after combustion this will result in a net flow of carbon out of the atmosphere, i.e. Carbon Negative Technology, or Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

CLC is a form of unmixed combustion which uses an oxygen carrier to transfer oxygen from air to fuel and permits to have a pure flow of CO2, which can be easily captured at a low cost. The aim of the project is to develop a multifuel CLC combustor which can be coupled with a Gas Turbine (GT). The combustor will work with new multi-metals oxides, to be used as oxygen carriers.

These will be prepared and characterized with respect to their structural and microscopic properties, and finally tested in a pilot plant, based on circulating fluidized bed reactor. Particular attention will be focused on biofuels injection, combustor design and reaction kinetics modeling. An approach that will analyze first the oxygen carrier particle behavior, then the reactor performance will be adopted.

Finally the results will be used to scale up the process and couple the combustor with a gas turbine, designing an innovative power plant together with a leading industrial partner, which will exploit the results.

It is expected that the project will generate important results, in order to implement an ambitious concept, needed for earth and society.