Summary The use of fossil fuel is expected to increase significantly by midcentury because of the large rise in the world energy demand despite the effective integration of renewable energies in the energy production sector. This increase, alongside with the development of stricter emission regulations, forced the manufacturers of combustion systems, especially gas turbines, to develop novel combustion techniques for the control of NOx and CO2 emissions, the latter being a greenhouse gas responsible for more than 60% to the global warming problem. The present review addresses different burner designs and combustion techniques for clean power production in gas turbines. Combustion and emission characteristics, flame instabilities, and solution techniques are presented, such as lean premixed air‐fuel (LPM) and premixed oxy‐fuel combustion techniques, and the combustor performance is compared for both cases. The fuel flexibility approach is also reviewed, as one of the combustion techniques for controlling emissions and reducing flame instabilities, focusing on the hydrogen‐enrichment and the integrated fuel‐flexible premixed oxy‐combustion approaches. State‐of‐the‐art burner designs for gas turbine combustion applications are reviewed in this study, including stagnation point reverse flow (SPRF) burner, dry low NOx (DLN) and dry low‐emission (DLE) burners, EnVironmental burners (including EV, AEV, and SEV burners), perforated plate (PP) burner, and micromixer (MM) burner. Special emphasis is made on the MM combustor technology, as one of the most recent advances in gas turbines for stable premixed flame operation with wide turndown and effective control of NOx emissions. Since the generation of pure oxygen is prerequisite to oxy‐combustion, oxygen‐separation membranes became of immense importance either for air separation for clean oxy‐combustion applications or for conversion/splitting of the effluent CO2 into useful chemical and energy products. The different carbon‐capture technologies, along with the most recent carbon‐utilization approaches towards CO2 emissions control, are also reviewed.

This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation of combustion characteristics of nonswirl CH4/CO2/O2 flames under atmospheric pressure in a lean-premixed multihole burner’s gas-turbine model combustor. The CO2 and O2 are well premixed and then channeled to a test rig, which is made up of a 2 in. diameter 1 m long pipe to premix the fuel and oxidizers before getting to the multihole burner. The burner consists of main holes and subholes that prevent flashbacks that may lead to rig explosion. The burner imparts jet to the premixed measured composition of CH4/CO2/O2. The results indicated that the adiabatic flame temperature (T ad) is a strong controlling parameter in quantifying the stability map and combustor flame shape; variation in oxygen fraction and equivalence ratio influence the flame shape, whereas the equivalence ratio (ϕ) is the major controlling parameter of temperature distribution within the combustor. The results also indicated that the stability map does not follow the lines of constant power density, mass flow rate of the mixture (ṁ mix), and Reynolds number (Re).

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