With the growing concern about global warming placing greater demands on improving energy efficiency and reducing CO 2 emissions, the need for improving the energy intensive, separation processes involving CO 2 is well recognized. The US Department of Energy estimates that the separation of CO 2 represents 75% of the cost associated with its separation, storage, transport, and sequestration operations. Hence, energy efficient, CO 2 separation technologies with improved economics are needed for industrial processing and for future options to capture and concentrate CO 2 for reuse or sequestration. The overall goal of this review is to foster the development of new adsorption and membrane technologies to improve manufacturing efficiency and reduce CO 2 emissions. This study focuses on the power, petrochemical, and other CO 2 emitting industries, and provides a detailed review of the current commercial CO 2 separation technologies, i.e., absorption, adsorption, membrane, and cryogenic, an overview of the emerging adsorption and membrane technologies for CO 2 separation, and both near and long term recommendations for future research on adsorption and membrane technologies. Flow sheets of the principal CO 2 producing processes are provided for guidance and new conceptual flow sheets with ideas on the placement of CO 2 separations technologies have also been devised.