Game changer? UC Berkeley chemists develop powder to suck carbon dioxide from the air

Old_Joe

The following is a recent report from the San Francisco Chronicle:

A team of UC Berkeley chemists have developed a potential solution in the form of yellow crystalline powder, a half-pound of which can absorb as much carbon dioxide annually as a tree.

Deployed at scale, the material could significantly reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere in a way no other technology can, said Omar Yaghi, professor of chemistry and UC Berkeley and lead author of a paper announcing their discovery, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“This is a game-changer,” Yaghi said.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that has proliferated in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, driving up global temperatures and upping climate volatility with more heat waves, storms, drought and wildfires.

Capturing carbon from the air is a complex and still developing area of science. Oil refineries employ technology to capture carbon dioxide for reuse in drilling, but it only collects carbon that is highly concentrated. No large-scale options exist to suck carbon out of the ambient air.

At Yaghi’s Berkeley lab, students and colleagues set out to find a porous substance that could absorb CO2. After much trial and error, they synthesized a material called a crystalline covalent organic framework or, more simply, referred to as COF-999.

Their creation was put to the test on the Berkeley campus over 20 days in January. Student scientists measured ambient concentrations of carbon dioxide and charted how the COF-999 powder absorbed it all.

Yaghi said his lab’s innovation “is the best material to date for direct carbon capture from open air.”

The powder is made from relatively common and inexpensive materials that can be transformed back into their original form, purified and reused, according to Yaghi. That means they require little energy to manufacture and don’t generate much waste.

Yaghi said the next step will be to “fine-tune” processes to manufacture multi-ton quantities of the powder so it can be widely used. He estimated it could be scaled up and commercialized within one to two years.

hank

Not to demean your excellent post OJ - Some interesting economic ramifications for sure.

Digressing …. I’ve read somewhere that late in life and having grown pessimistic about humanity Mark Twain wondered aloud whether a machine might be invented someday that would remove all the oxygen from the atmosphere for 24-hours.

Twain suffered financial and personal loss late in life, going bankrupt and losing both wife and daughter several years before he passed in 1910.

Anna

@hank Well, maybe all that TaF-COF1910 surface area just sucks all the Twains right out of the upper class. All that structure stuff and capture reminds me of my undergraduate days pretending at research on micelles but, of course, they didn't suck, just capture and caged by grabbing tails. That powder sucking thing I wasn't able to resolve. I wouldn't think simple gradient diffusion would be fast enough. I am getting old and way behind the science as you see. Indeed, I do love 3-d structure builds. (TaF-COF1910=Twain and Family covalent organic framework 1910.)

hank

@Anna - You’re way over my head. Hell, I just figured out what COALX is!