Dear Colleagues,

The issue of carbon emission reduction by many industrial processes and human activities leads to the necessity to cope with CO₂ release, by introducing new processes focused on good practice through reusing and recycling. The available CO₂ could be also seen as an opportunity, and not simply as a problem. Among the possibilities, CO₂ can be used as a reactant for power production in many advanced energy systems or as a storage and operating medium for waste heat recovery. Some examples of conceived advanced solutions are supercritical CO₂ cycles for heat recovery and power production, electrolysis and power-to-gas technologies fed by CO₂ for energy storage, energy districts integrated with CO₂ and biomethane sources and small-scale energy generation/storage.

In the future, all or some of these technologies can play an increasing role within the energy generation sector and they can help to achieve carbon footprint reduction targets in many industrial processes. In particular, the state-of-the-art techniques, in many cases, still require improvements; efficient and low-cost components are not fully developed and problems must be solved. This Special Issue will focus on the current state of the art, and on cutting-edge research activities ongoing in the energy generation and storage sector related to CO₂ utilization as key working fluid.  The research articles submitted should shed light on the energy convenience of CO₂ utilization in such advanced solutions.

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to:

• Advanced thermodynamic cycles;
• Supercritical CO₂ cycles;
• Power-to-gas and gas-to-power storage systems;
• Fuel cells and electrolysis with CO₂;
• New integrations of CO₂ capture and energy systems;
• Combined heat and power generation with CO₂;
• Energy networks with CO₂;
• Biomethane and synthetic methane plants.

Prof. Dr. Andrea De Pascale
Dr. Maria Alessandra Ancona
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Energies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

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• s-CO₂
• thermodynamic cycle
• waste heat recovery (WHR)
• power-to-gas (P2G)
• energy harvesting
• energy storage
• fuel cells and electrolysis