They create a material that captures carbon dioxide from the air without suffering degradation

Capturing carbon dioxide produced by human civilization activities is essential to reducing the buildup of greenhouse gases and slowing global warming, but current carbon dioxide capture technologies only work well with sources where this gas is highly concentrated. concentrated, such as at the outlet of an industrial chimney. Such technologies cannot effectively capture carbon dioxide from air away from such sources. In this normal ambient air, the concentration of CO2 is hundreds of times lower than that found at the outlet of such chimneys.

The direct capture of CO2 in normal air is the only plausible way to reverse the increase in the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere, a presence that has already reached 426 parts per million (ppm), 50% higher than the level that existed shortly before the start of the Industrial Revolution. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without active CO2 reduction, we will not achieve the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the average temperature before the Industrial Revolution.

A new type of absorbent material developed by chemists at the University of California at Berkeley (United States) could help the world achieve negative greenhouse gas emissions, that is, the amount of greenhouse gas removed from the atmosphere exceeds to the amount of the released in it. The porous material, of the type known as “COF”, for “covalent organic framework”, captures CO2 from normal air and does not suffer degradation from the action of water or other agents, which do suffer, among other limitations. , existing technologies for the direct capture of CO2 in normal air.

The achievement is the work of a team made up of, among others, Omar Yaghi and Zihui Zhou, from the aforementioned university.

The new material is called COF-999.

About 200 grams of this material can absorb as much CO2 (20 kilograms) in a year as a typical tree.

Artistic recreation of the structure of the new material capable of capturing carbon dioxide efficiently and without degrading. (Illustration: Chaoyang Zhao/UC Berkeley)

Capturing the carbon dioxide that comes out of industrial chimneys is a way to stop climate change because we try not to release CO2 into the air. Instead, direct capture in the air is a method of returning us to the atmosphere that was on Earth 100 or more years ago. “Currently, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is above 420 ppm, but it will increase to 500 or 550 before we develop and fully employ flue gas capture,” Zhou warns. “Therefore, if we want to reduce its concentration and return to perhaps 400 or 300 ppm, we have to use direct capture in the air.”

Yaghi, Zhou and their colleagues present the technical details of the new material in the academic journal Nature, under the title “Carbon dioxide capture from open air using covalent organic frameworks.” (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)