Drastic enhancement of CO2 adsorption capacity by negatively charged sub-bituminous coal
Hussein Rasool Abid, Stefan Iglauer, Ahmed Al‐Yaseri, Alireza Keshavarz
Abstract
Climate change is a key problem of the 21st century. Climate change is mainly caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and one solution to this problem is to capture and store CO2 in deep coal seams, where it is immobilized by adsorption to the coal surface. Here we propose to modify the coal with methyl orange (MO), a typical dye that is also a major pollutant of the hydrosphere and removed thereby. Thus, raw and MO-modified coals were characterized to investigate their thermal stabilities, textural properties, carbon contents, surface characteristics, and CO2 adsorption on the coal samples was measured at typical storage conditions (323 K and pressures up to 37.5 bar). CO2 adsorption dramatically increased in the MO-coal, from 1.95 mol. kg−1 (raw coal) to 18.7 mol. kg −1. This work thus aids in the development of improved methods for CO2 storage, to significantly mitigate climate change.