New Absorbing Material Claims To Capture CO2 From Ambient Air To Combat Global Warming

UC Berkeley chemists have developed a new material that can capture CO2 from ambient air without degradation, potentially aiding in reducing atmospheric CO2 levels.

Hyderabad:A new absorbing material developed by UC Berkeley chemists can reportedly capture CO2 from ambient air without degradation, potentially aiding in reducing atmospheric CO2 levels and combating global warming. The study, published in the journal Nature, claims the new absorbing material could help get the world to negative emissions.

Capturing and storing human-produced carbon dioxide is key to lowering atmospheric greenhouse gases, but the current carbon capture technologies work well only for high-concentration sources like power plant exhausts. For low concentrations, the same methods prove inefficient. This is where the new porous material -- a covalent organic framework (COF) -- could prove useful as it can capture CO2 from ambient air without degradation by water or other contaminants, which is one of the limitations of existing DAC technologies.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, direct air capture (DAC) is crucial for reversing the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 ppm, and is necessary to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

Omar Yaghi, a UC Berkeley professor, highlighted the effectiveness of a new material that completely removed CO2 from outdoor air in tests, noting its potential to enhance existing carbon capture systems and address climate change.

“Flue gas capture is a way to slow down climate change because you are trying not to release CO2 to the air. Direct air capture is a method to take us back to like it was 100 or more years ago,” Zhou said. “Currently, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is more than 420 ppm, but that will increase to maybe 500 or 550 before we fully develop and employ flue gas capture. So if we want to decrease the concentration and go back to maybe 400 or 300 ppm, we have to use direct air capture.”

UC Berkeley graduate student and the paper's first author Zihui Zhou stated that 200 grams of the new material can capture as much CO2 in a year as a tree, emphasising that direct air capture is essential to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels back to pre-industrial concentrations.