Introduction

The IEAGHG High Temperature Solid Looping Cycles Network emerged from the preceding International Workshop on In-situ CO₂ Removal (ISCR) and aims at bringing together researchers and developers of CO₂ capture technologies that operate at high temperatures in cylindrical processes using either circulating or fixed beds of solids.  

Within the last few years drawbacks of the conventional amine-based CO₂ capture systems have spurred interest in solid looping processes. Since then the technology has advanced considerably and several pilot plants have been build and brought into operation, e.g the 1.7MW pilot plant at La Pereda in Spain and the 1MW pilot plant at TU Darmstadt in Germany. Progress has been made in particular in carrier/sorbent development as well as in process design and integration. In Calcium Looping, for instance, the use of spent sorbent to produce cement has been demonstrated.

The fourth meeting of the IEAGHG High Temperature Solid Looping Network was held from 20^th to 21^st August 2012 at the Xijiao Hotel in Beijing and was co-organised by Tsinghua University. Beijing was chosen as the location for this meeting to make the network more accessible to an international selection of participants, especially from Asia.

Although the number of attendees for this meeting was slightly down at about 48, there was a full two day programme with 31 presentations, 10 posters, a plenary discussion and a visit to the “Key Laboratory for Thermal Science and Power Engineering of Ministry of Education” at Tsinghua University.

The Technical Programme consisted of four sessions in total. Three sessions were related to progress made in Calcium Looping in the fields of sorbent development, H₂ production and reactor and process design. One session was reserved for Chemical Looping Combustion and presented advances in carrier development as well as some new process concepts.

Conclusions

At this meeting further steady progress is evident in formulation and testing of sorbents, integration of both CLC and CaL processes with an extending range of industrial processes and in the emergence of encouraging  first results from larger scale testing of  the process in MW scale demonstration units.  A better understanding of the science behind sorbent performance is needed to make the search for better materials more effective.  There is also an emerging need to develop a set of credible techno-economic performance figures for the technology to justify further and potentially increasing R&D expenditures as phase in which larger demonstration units are required is entered. Finally the environmental performance of the processes needs to be assessed more rigorously especially as this may represent a considerable advantage over competing systems.

Offers to hold the next meeting in Canada or Cambridge (UK) were gratefully received. After considerable debate the meeting proposed to accept the offer from the University of Cambridge (UK) for the 2013 meeting. A decision on whether to hold a meeting in 2014 in view of the plans to hold the biennial CLC conference somewhere in Europe around the same time will be made at a future date.  One alternative is to move to biennial meetings.

All participants agreed that this meeting had been most successful and expressed their sincere thanks to the staff at Tsinghua University  for their hard work and excellent organisation.