It is generally accepted by the scientific community that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are leading to global climate change, notably an increase in global temperatures commonly referred to as global warming. The primary source of anthropogenic CO2 emissions is the combustion of fossil fuels for energy. As society's demand for energy increases and more CO2 is produced, it becomes imperative to decrease the amount emitted to the atmosphere. One promising approach to do this is to capture CO2 at the effluent of the combustion site, namely, power plants, in a process called postcombustion CO2 capture. Technologies to achieve this are heavily researched due in large part to the intuitive nature of removing CO2 from the stack gas and the ease in retrofitting existing CO2 sources with these technologies. As such, several reviews have been written on postcombustion CO2 capture. However, it is a fast-developing field, and the most recent review papers already do not include the state-of-the-art research. Notable among CO2 capture technologies are amine-based technologies. Amines are well-known for their reversible reactions with CO2, which make them ideal for the separation of CO2 from many CO2-containing gases, including flue gas. For this reason, this review will cover amine-based technology developed and published in and after the year 2013.

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CO2 capture is typically a costly operation, usually due to the energy required for regeneration of the capture medium. Na2CO3 is one potential capture medium with the potential to decrease this energy requirement. Extensively researched as a potential sorbent for CO2, Na2CO3 is well-known for its theoretically low energy requirement, due largely to its relatively low heat of reaction compared to other capture technologies. Its primary pitfalls, however, are its extremely low reaction rate during sorption and slow regeneration of Na2CO3. Before Na2CO3 can be used as a CO2 sorbent, it is critical to increase its reaction rate. In order to do so, this project studied nanoporous FeOOH as a potential supporting material for Na2CO3. Because regeneration of the sorbent is the most energy-intensive step when using Na2CO3 for CO2 sorption, this project focused on the decomposition of NaHCO3, which is equivalent to CO2 desorption. Using Brunauer–Emmet–Teller analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, magnetic susceptibility tests, and Mössbauer spectroscopy, we show FeOOH to be thermally stable both with and without the presence of NaHCO3 at temperatures necessary for sorption and regeneration, up to about 200 °C. More significantly, we observe that FeOOH not only increases the surface area of NaHCO3, but also has a catalytic effect on the decomposition of NaHCO3, reducing activation energy from 80 to 44 kJ/mol. This reduction in activation energy leads to a significant increase in the reaction rate by a factor of nearly 50, which could translate into a substantial decrease in the cost of using Na2CO3 for CO2 capture.