Preface

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is one of the major greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming and anthropogenic climate change. Unfortunately, it is predicted that the atmospheric CO₂ concentration will continue to increase in the next several decades because fossil fuels will still be the dominant energy source. In recent years, worldwide effort has been made to reduce CO₂ emissions, among which capturing using solid adsorbents/sorbents has attracted intense attention from both academia and industry. I have been working on CO₂ capture materials since 2009, and have witnessed nearly one-thousand papers per year being published in this field. With this rapid development, I believe that it was necessary to edit a book to summarize all the important progresses made with each type of CO₂ capture material. Professor Dermot O'Hare, University of Oxford suggested that this could be part of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Inorganic Materials Series. He suggested two books entitled Pre-combustion Carbon Dioxide Capture Materials and Post-combustion Carbon Dioxide Capture Materials. I am confident that these works will benefit advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working in both academia and industry on this topic.

This book is organized into five chapters and focuses on the intermediate- and high-temperature CO₂ sorbents used in the pre-combustion CO₂ capture processes, e.g., the sorption enhanced water gas shift (SEWGD) process, the sorption enhanced biomass reforming (SEBR) process, and the sorption enhanced steam reforming (SESR) process, etc. This book aims to present the full picture of various pre-combustion CO₂ capture materials including layered double hydroxides-derived mixed metal oxides, MgO, CaO, and alkali/alkaline ceramics. The discussion of each type of sorbent starts with the fundamental mechanism for CO₂ capture, followed by the preparation and modification of materials, and their capture capacity, kinetics, and recycling stability, etc. In the fifth chapter, we present research progress in the system and processes of pre-combustion CO₂ capture and separation.

The editor thanks all the contributors to this book, particularly Professor Dermot O'Hare (University of Oxford, UK), Associate Professor Luyi Sun (University of Connecticut, USA), Assistant Professor Claire Courson (University of Strasbourg, France), Professor Katia Gallucci (University of L'Aquila, Italy), Professor Heriberto Pfeiffer (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México), Associate Professor Yixiang Shi and Professor Ningsheng Cai (Tsinghua University, China), Professor Ben Anthony (Cranfield University, UK) and all the students and researchers involved in each chapter.

Also, I would like to express my special acknowledgement to Professor Duncan Bruce (University of York, UK), Professor Dermot O'Hare (University of Oxford, UK), and Professor Richard Walton (University of Warwick, UK), who accepted and supported this project, and to Connor Sheppard, Leanne Marle, Sylvia Pegg, and Robin Driscoll for all their support during the editing of this book. Finally, I thank the Royal Society of Chemistry for supporting this edition.

Qiang Wang