UC Berkeley chemists have developed a groundbreaking covalent organic framework (COF) that could revolutionize carbon capture directly from ambient air, offering a new tool in the fight against climate change.
In a significant breakthrough that could dramatically enhance our ability to combat climate change, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have unveiled a revolutionary material capable of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from ambient air. This innovative material, known as a covalent organic framework (COF), could help meet the ambitious global targets for reducing greenhouse gases.
Current carbon capture technologies excel at removing CO2 from concentrated sources, such as power plant emissions, but fall short when it comes to capturing it from the air, where concentrations are much lower.
Direct air capture (DAC), which aims to directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere, has long been hindered by these limitations, making the new COF a crucial advancement.
UC Berkeley’s chemistry professor Omar Yaghi, who is the senior author of the study, expressed excitement over the new material.
“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,” Yaghi said in a news release.
The COF stands out for its durability, resistance to environmental contaminants and the ability to undergo numerous absorption and desorption cycles without degrading. This marks a significant improvement over previous materials that degraded after repeated use.
“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,” Yaghi added.
Graduate student Zihui Zhou, the first author of the study, highlighted the material’s impressive efficiency.
“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,” he said in the news release.
The COF can absorb as much CO2 in a year as a tree, with just 200 grams of the material capable of capturing 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of CO2 annually. This efficiency is crucial as atmospheric CO2 levels have already reached 426 parts per million (ppm), far above pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
“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,” Zhou added.
The introduction of COFs could be a game-changer for not just carbon capture but also a range of environmental applications. Yaghi’s pioneering work on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and COFs has led to advancements like harvesting water in arid environments, underscoring the versatility and impact of these materials.
Yaghi acknowledged that developing a material capable of meeting the demanding specifications for air capture is no small feat.
“Trapping CO2 from air is a very challenging problem,” he added. “It’s energetically demanding, you need a material that has high carbon dioxide capacity, that’s highly selective, that’s water stable, oxidatively stable, recyclable. It needs to have a low regeneration temperature and needs to be scalable.”
The COF-999, the specific COF developed by Yaghi’s team, is constructed from olefin polymers configured to hold amine groups that capture CO2 molecules effectively. Remarkably, the COF can withstand 100 cycles of use without losing capacity, requiring minimal energy for regeneration compared to other materials.
“This COF has a strong chemically and thermally stable backbone, it requires less energy, and we have shown it can withstand 100 cycles with no loss of capacity. No other material has been shown to perform like that,” Yaghi added. “It’s basically the best material out there for direct air capture.”
Yaghi is optimistic about leveraging artificial intelligence to further enhance these materials. The Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP) at UC Berkeley, where Yaghi serves as scientific director, is driving efforts to utilize AI in the development of advanced COFs and MOFs for broader environmental applications.
“We’re very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we’ve been doing,” Yaghi said.
As the world continues its fight against climate change, innovations like this COF offer a glimmer of hope and underscore the urgent need for continued research and development in carbon capture technologies. UC Berkeley’s groundbreaking work could be pivotal in achieving the target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a critical threshold identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The study, published in the journal Nature, offers a detailed look at this potentially transformative approach to carbon capture.