Scientists Develop Breakthrough Material for Carbon Capture, Could Reverse Rising CO2 Levels

[Judi Lynn]

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed an innovative material, COF-999, that can efficiently remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, offering a potential breakthrough in carbon capture technology. This new material is stable, reusable, and can remove CO2 at room temperature, making it a promising tool in the fight against climate change.

Published on October 23, 2024 14:17
By Lydia Amazouz



Scientists Develop Breakthrough Material for Carbon Capture, Could Reverse Rising CO2 Levels - © The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

Scientists at UC Berkeley have developed a groundbreaking material that promises to significantly advance carbon capture technologies.

This material, known as covalent organic framework-999 (COF-999), has the ability to efficiently remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air, a critical step in addressing rising CO2 levels linked to climate change. Unlike existing technologies, which are most effective in environments with high CO2 concentrations, COF-999 works in everyday atmospheric conditions. This new development could be a major breakthrough in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

How COF-999 Captures CO2 Directly from the Air
The innovation behind COF-999 lies in its unique porous structure and its capacity to adsorb CO2 at room temperature. The material consists of hexagonal channels that are decorated with amines, which interact with CO2 molecules as air passes through. This interaction traps the carbon dioxide on the material’s surface, making it highly efficient at capturing CO2 without needing the extreme heat or pressure typically required by other carbon capture systems.

Professor Omar Yaghi, a key figure in the development of COF-999, highlighted the material’s potential, saying, “We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air—just outdoor air—into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO2.” He added, “I am excited about it because there’s nothing like it out there in terms of performance. It breaks new ground in our efforts to address the climate problem.”

More:
https://dailygalaxy.com/2024/10/material-carbon-capture-reverse-co2-levels/

[VMA131Marine]

1. Great! The question is ...

1/ How does it scale into a system that can remove one quadrillion of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere?

And

2/ Does it remove more CO2 than it takes to produce it?

And

3/ Where do we put it once it’s saturated with CO2?

And m

4/ How much will it cost?

I’m sure we can solve these problems but don’t expect this to be deployed tomorrow… or next year …

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. First paragraph says it is reusable, to your question 3. . . . . nt

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Capturing carbon from the air just got easier

Capturing carbon from the air just got easier

A new type of porous material called a covalent organic framework quickly sucks up carbon dioxide from ambient air

By Robert Sanders


The new porous material for capturing carbon dioxide, called a covalent organic framework (COF), has hexagonal channels decorated with polyamines that efficiently bind carbon dioxide molecules (blue and orange balls) at concentrations found in ambient air.
Chaoyang Zhao

October 23, 2024

Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide humans produce is key to lowering atmospheric greenhouse gases and slowing global warming, but today’s carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases.

Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO₂ levels, which have reached 426 parts per million (ppm), 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won’t reach humanity’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preexisting global averages.

A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions. The porous material — a covalent organic framework (COF) — captures CO₂ from ambient air without degradation by water or other contaminants, one of the limitations of existing DAC technologies.

“We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO₂. Everything,” said Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper that will appear online Oct. 23 in the journal Nature.

…


A vial of COF-999, which is yellow, with UC Berkeley’s landmark campanile in the background.
Zihui Zhou, UC Berkeley

…

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08080-x

As VMA131Marine suggests, it’s promissing, but a long way from “prime time” (from the Nature article):

…

Outlook
We have shown how COFs with an olefin-linked backbone and covalently attached sorption sites, bringing ultrahigh chemical stability, can serve as excellent materials for capturing CO₂ from the air. Our studies demonstrate that this application in the open air is a marked advance towards achieving clean air. It is also clear that the present COF-999 is perhaps one of the first members of what we believe will be a large class of materials with a robust framework backbone that we expect will serve the general purpose of carbon capture very well. By applying this strategy, other reticular structures will have to be designed, examined and compared with COF-999 to further improve the capacity and performance. In the meantime, the scalability of this COF and the design of a practical device will be an important priority for future implementation of these materials.

…

[Think. Again.]

4. Sounds like a great start to removing residual atmospheric CO2 once we stop placing it there.

[NNadir]

5. If one looks in the literature, there are literally thousands of similar "breakthroughs." I applaud efforts...

...to popularize them, but I think it unwise to make sweeping "could" statements that will only increase cynicism.

The general class of organic frameworks, the most common of which are MOF's, metal organic frameworks, are often cited for carbon capture, but no matter what of the many tens of thousands of such schemes announced, the real issue is that carbon capture requires energy.

MOF's and in this case "COF's" are often mentioned in the context of DAC, direct air capture, which strikes me at the edge of feasibility, but essentially useless if the energy required to accomplish this, DAC, (or better DSWC, direct seawater capture), is derived from dangerous fossil fuels. In both cases, they are perpetual motion machines, something as the crisis of extreme global heating worsens, is regrettably being popularized as a "solution."

Perpetual motion machines do not exist.

Fossil fuels, primary energy, is the problem and much of the advertising of hydrogen, carbon capture and sequestration, so called "renewable energy," is designed to divert attention from this fact. Right now there is no path in practice or close to practice (except the often unjustly maligned nuclear energy) that can eliminate fossil fuels, or even that can reduce the use of dangerous fossil fuels. The use of fossil fuels is increasing, not decreasing, as I noted yesterday:

The 2024 IEA World Energy Outlook has been released; World Energy Demand Grew by 13 Exajoules, Solar and Wind by 2 EJ.

The increased use of dangerous fossil fuels was 9 Exajoules (EJ), dangerous coal by 3 EJ, dangerous petroleum (for energy purposes) by 5 EJ, and dangerous natural gas by 1 EJ. Hydro decreased by 1 EJ, possibly because of worldwide droughts.

Overall, dangerous fossil fuels provided 512 EJ of the world energy supply in 2023, up from 503 EJ in 2022. In the "percent talk" used by advocates of so called "renewable energy" 80% of the world energy supply still comes from dangerous fossil fuels.

World energy demand has risen to 642 EJ. Things are getting worse, faster, not better.

[Cheezoholic]

6. While tech like this may show promise on the surface, humans can't replace a planet wide ecosystem

I mean just for example, the largest carbon sink in the world are the worlds oceans. We are covering these vast pieces of natures gas recycling system with plastics. Plastics like bottles etc don't decay as we know but they do break up. Break up into ever smaller pieces down to Micro, even Nano, levels. While it is tragic to see what plastics are doing to sea life at the top of the food chain, studies in the last 50 years are beginning to show just how massively, quickly and in numerous ways this evil by-product of the fossil fuel industry is limiting the ability of plankton to not only absorb CO2 from but also to release Oxygen back into the atmosphere.

To put an ! point on how the oceans are truly our last chance at removing vast amounts of CO2, we're almost out of rain forests now. It's estimated Congolese rain forest is the last strongly net negative CO2 rainforest left on the planet and we've destroyed so much natural vegetation in general world wide that land based plants overall have gone CO2 net positive!

The ocean may very well be all we have left yet we continue to non-stop dump by the giga-tons plastics in all forms that will infect it far faster than we can deal with it. Heck, you may not think of it but if your not wearing 100% natural clothing every time you wash something with polyester (a form of plastic) pieces of that make their way past all of the supposed filtration in our not so great waste water system, eventually into either our water tables or the ocean. Every time you spit after polishing those pearly whites you're spitting plastic into the water system. It's so much more than bottles and straws and bags. It's insane when you really start using the information at your fingertips to find out just how many ways and just how much and just how utterly devastating plastics are to our last life line for not just CO2 sequestration but the gas we need to survive no matter how much we stink it up. Robotic tug boats with plastic collecting draglines or some kind of plastic eating superbug, whatever, are just not realistic. We are arrogant to think anything except to stop using it will work.

While this technology may be promising sometime in the future there's no way we are going to come up with an "artificial" ocean type system that can absorb CO2 at the levels our oceans do. It scares the shit out of me and I see no quick way out of the plastic life we're addicted to. Big Oil and Big Petrol-chemical companies (and those easily purchased friends in government) have been lying about and suppressing the insane dangers of plastics almost as long as they have been doing so about about fossil fuel CO2 emissions and continue to do so.

And this is only scratching the surface of the human induced decimation of the planets lungs. Overall we are bringing the most evil gas, Methane, online before we even get ahold of CO2's tail. I get a lot of flack from this opinion but while I do believe we need to invest in finding true from the ground up net zero/negative ways to reduce human produced CO2 (yes, nukes are an unfortunate part of that IMO), I think carbon sequestration is like trying to fight a modern war with clubs of bone.

This immense challenge we face is not going to get resolved in the next 10, 20, 30 or even 100 years IMO. While we must resolve it for our species to have a chance (life will go on without us no matter how much we fuck this rock up IMO) I think we need to wake up and in order to give our direct descendants a chance start spending more and more money on adapting to survive in this ever inhospitable world we've created. That also includes a massive generational attempt at re-structuring and more importantly retraining ourselves out of this completely impossible socio-economic system and to try and do the absolute hardest part... get ourselves to net-negative population growth. Of course to that point its more than likely nature will take out a few billion of us if not ourselves before we figure out how to do that.

We've just screwed with our aquarium so much that, it's not a very bright future right now unfortunately IMO. We're going to have to learn how to live with what we have while re-doing how we live in order to get back to some kind of an equilibrium.. far into the future.

Partial source - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe

[Gore1FL]

7. We kind of have already with CO2. nt