One vision of clean energy for the future is to produce hydrogen from coal in an ultra-clean plant. The conventional route consists of reacting the coal gasification product (after removal of trace impurities) with steam in a water gas shift (WGS) reactor to convert CO to CO 2 and H 2 , followed by purification of the effluent gas in a pressure swing adsorption (PSA) unit to produce a high purity hydrogen product. PSA processes can also be designed to produce a CO 2 by-product at ambient pressure. This work proposes a novel concept called "Thermal Swing Sorption Enhanced Reaction (TSSER)" which simultaneously carries out the WGS reaction and the removal of CO 2 from the reaction zone by using a CO 2 chemisorbent in a single unit operation. The concept directly produces a fuel-cell grade H 2 and compressed CO 2 as a by-product gas. Removal of CO 2 from the reaction zone circumvents the equilibrium limitations of the reversible WGS reaction and enhances its forward rate of reaction. Recently measured sorption-desorption characteristics of two novel, reversible CO 2 chemisorbents (K 2 CO 3 promoted hydrotalcite and Na 2 O promoted alumina) are reviewed and the simulated performance of the proposed TSSER concept using the promoted hydrotalcite as the chemisorbent is reported.