Chemical looping combustion (CLC) of coal has received great attention for its verified advantage in the inherent separation of CO 2 without great cost penalty. It would be meaningful to adopt anthracite as fuel for CLC application in China due to its abundant reserve in China and also a great challenge for its low reactivity. A typical Chinese anthracite as Yang Quan (YQ) coal was selected in this research as a model fuel and its reaction with both synthesized CuO/Al 2 O 3 and Fe 2 O 3 /Al 2 O 3 oxygen carriers (OCs) was performed in a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA) to investigate the reaction peculiarities involved. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) was used to in-situ detect the emitted gasses from TGA. Field scanning electron microscopy/energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry (FSEM-EDX) was used to study the morphology and elemental compositions present in the solid residues collected from the reaction of YQ with these two OCs, and the related phase was identified by X-ray diffraction (XRD). In order to further explore the reaction mechanisms involved, a more realistic reaction system with 426 species was designed for thermodynamic simulation. Through all these measures, two reaction stages were observed for the reaction of YQ with Fe 2 O 3 /Al 2 O 3 or CuO/Al 2 O 3 at 300–600°C and 600–850°C after dehydration, respectively. The maximum weight loss rate for YQ with CuO/Al 2 O 3 at the second stage was pronounced enough to reach up to 2.8wt.%/min, greatly higher than that of YQ with Fe 2 O 3 /Al 2 O 3 . The mixture conversion index for YQ with CuO/Al 2 O 3 was far bigger than that of YQ with Fe 2 O 3 /Al 2 O 3, which further indicated that CuO/Al 2 O 3 was more suitable to YQ in CLC. At these two stages throughout 400 to 1100°C, CuO and CuAl 2 O 4 contained in CuO/Al 2 O 3 OC were mainly reduced to Cu and Cu 2 O or CuAlO 2 and Al 2 O 3 by transfer of the lattice oxygen [O] involved to YQ in a sequential mode; however, above 800°C, Cu 2 O and CuAlO 2 were also produced through direct decomposition of CuO or CuAl 2 O 4 by emission of gaseous oxygen O 2 , which was beneficial to the direct combustion of coal. During reaction of YQ with CuO/Al 2 O 3 OC, active CuO was found to tend to react with various sulfur species produced from YQ pyrolysis and formed to Cu 2 S, but the Al 2 SiO 5 was formed through the interaction of Al 2 O 3 with SiO 2 in the YQ, which resulted in the loss of the inert support involved in the CuO/Al 2 O 3 OC and further degraded its reactivity to YQ due to the lower resistance to sintering.