Thermodynamically, the higher concentration of CO2 in industrial flue gas means you can capture CO2 there more efficiently than you can from the ambient air. H

Thermodynamically, the higher concentration of CO2 in industrial flue gas means you can capture CO2 there more efficiently than you can from the ambient air. However, industrial carbon capture typically is a loser because processing the huge volumes of gas produced by industrial equipment is neither cheap nor easy, requiring very large & energy intensive facilities. The products produced by such purification aren't valuable enough to offset those costs, and industry will not shoulder that burden out of the goodness of its cold mechanical heart. Chemical looping can reduce the cost of these processing facilities (or eliminate them completely) by dramatically reducing the number of impurities in the CO2 that is produced from combustion, especially nitrogen. I.e. it makes a more pure CO2 product from the get-go, which means the total volume of gas to process is lower, and purification is even easier.