A Sponge to Soak Up Carbon Dioxide From the Air

Modern Multi Fuel Power Plant

Berkeley Lab is pursuing a portfolio of negative emissions technologies and related research to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

A Q&A with Berkeley Lab scientist Jeffrey Long on a material for capturing CO2.

Human activity is now leading to the equivalent of 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere each year, putting us on track to increase the planet’s temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.25 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels by 2040. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change.

Increasingly, scientists are recognizing that negative emissions technologies (NETs) to remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be an essential component in the strategy to mitigate climate change. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a multidisciplinary Department of Energy research lab, is pursuing a portfolio of negative emissions technologies and related research. These range from geological and terrestrial sequestration, to conversion to bioproducts, to thermal reactors for hydrogen fuels.

Jeffrey Long

Jeffrey Long, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and also a professor in UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry.

A promising technology under development for NETs is carbon capture using a material called a MOF, or metal-organic framework. Jeffrey Long, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and also a professor in UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry, has been working with this unique material for a number of years.

Q. What is a MOF and what role can it play in reducing CO2 emissions?

A MOF, or metal-organic framework, is a type of solid material that is highly porous and behaves like a sponge, capable of soaking up vast quantities of a specific gas molecule, such as carbon dioxide. They’ve been around about 20 years, and there’s been an explosion in research over the last decade as scientists are finding more and more practical applications. What’s distinctive about MOFs is that they have extremely high internal surface areas. Just one gram of a MOF, an amount similar to a cube of sugar, can have a surface area greater than a football field. Consequently, if designed properly, a small amount of MOF can remove an enormous amount of CO2 from the exhaust gas produced by fossil fuel combustion.

We made a serendipitous discovery a few years ago that certain MOFs can capture carbon dioxide through an unprecedented switch-like mechanism. We further optimized the material for efficient removal of CO2 from a power plant flue before the gas enters the atmosphere. We showed that the capture and release of carbon dioxide from the MOF could be accomplished using much smaller temperature changes than required for other technologies, giving it a big advantage over conventional ways to capture CO2. (The adsorbed CO2 can then be utilized in other products.) This strategy eliminates the need to divert high-value, high-temperature steam away from power production, avoiding a large increase in the cost of electricity. In the course of these efforts, we also showed that variants of the MOFs could be efficient for the removal of CO2 from other gas mixtures, including biogas, natural gas, and even directly from air.

For direct air capture, MOFs are the best way we have of doing it that I see. For the carbon capture part of BECCS (or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, an emerging negative emissions technology), where you’re essentially growing trees or crops, combusting them for fuel, then capturing and sequestering that CO2, I think MOFs could also do the capture part better than any other material.

Q. That sounds very promising. What is the status of this technology now? Is it being used commercially?

A startup company called Mosaic Materials (in which I have a financial interest) was formed in 2014 to pursue commercial production of MOFs for various CO2 separation processes. At Berkeley Lab we’re leading a project funded through the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in which we are working with Mosaic Materials and a Canadian engineering company called Svante to carry out a pilot demonstration for a coal-fired power plant flue gas.

Here, use of the MOF in a unique rotating bed system can achieve quick capture-release cycle times and reduced energy consumption. Ultimately, it is envisioned that widespread commercial deployment of such technology could result in a dramatic reduction in the cost and energy associated with carbon capture, as it necessarily becomes implemented across the globe.

Elsewhere, MOFs are in commercial use for the safe storage of other hazardous gases. For CO2capture, I’d say they are now close to being ready for commercial deployment.

Q. If that is the case, then what further research on MOFs is needed?

We need to lower the cost of direct air capture dramatically. It’s very expensive to do now. There are companies already doing it – they build units with fans blowing air through devices containing porous materials – but the materials in use are not very effective, making the units extremely expensive to operate. The cost of removing CO2 with such a technology is currently on the order of $500 to $1,000 per ton. We need to devise higher performance materials to help get the cost down below $100 per ton.

The main issue behind this high cost is the amount of energy required for regenerating the adsorbent – that is, for releasing the CO2 in pure form so the material can then be used again to capture more CO2. Here, we think the cooperative adsorption mechanism accessible in MOFs could significantly reduce the heat and vacuum requirements for regeneration.

Another consideration, though, is the energy required for blowing air. If you have a stream of air coming in that’s 410 parts per million CO2, one of the difficulties is that most materials might remove a small amount of that and lower the CO2 concentration to, say, 300 ppm, capturing 25% of the CO2. That’s what’s called the capture rate. And then to capture more, you have to basically flow more air through the material to fill it up.

But with a capture rate of, say, 90% you could lower the CO2 concentration to 40 parts per million with a single pass. That means you’re blowing a lot less air for removing the CO2 and therefore saving energy.

One of our research goals is to develop materials that have a high capacity, a high capture rate, fast kinetics for CO2 adsorption, and a low regeneration temperature, while also limiting the co-adsorption of water so that you’re not wasting energy on its desorption if you don’t need to. The kinetics means how quickly the CO2 is taken up by the material.

I think there’s a path to getting to below $100 per ton of CO2 removed from air. There’s still a lot of research needed to get there. We need to really rethink some of the ways the materials are designed and understand how to manipulate things like delta-S (entropy) for CO2 adsorption, so that less heat is required for CO2 release.

11 Comments on "A Sponge to Soak Up Carbon Dioxide From the Air"

  1. The problem with any sort of “soaking up”, permanent CO2 capture and storage, is that the amount required to make a difference to the climate is so large that no technology can possibly handle it, even if scaled up globally. To remove even ONE part-per-million of CO2 would require the burial of almost 8,000 million metric tons (7.8 Gigaton to be exact). That wouldn’t even show up at the Mauna Loa measuring site.

  2. Clyde Spencer | April 18, 2021 at 7:18 pm | Reply

    Perhaps the problem with the economics is an inability to think outside the box! The implication of the article is that they are looking for a dedicated way to release the CO2. If the best method is heating, then instead of looking for a cheap way to build a dedicated heater, why not consider ways to piggy-back on things that already produce waste heat, such as coal/gas fired powerplants, steam exhaust from nuclear plants, or the heat from steel and aluminun-making furnaces. Maybe giving people a ‘sugar cube’ a day to place on the exhaust manifold of their car, and giving them a tax incentive for doing so. Sometimes the materials researchers are too close to the problem and have trouble seeing the bigger picture.

    Then, there is the issue that the consensus may be wrong and CO2 isn’t a significant problem. Then the things that are being proposed will distort the economy with little or no benefit. We had better be certain that the consensus is right. The best way to do that is not to ignore the minority voices, or call them insulting names, but to engage them and answer the inconvenient questions they raise with evidence that is irrefutable.

  3. Clyde Spencer is right. We should have already learned from the pandemic travel lockdowns that the rapid reduction in fuel CO2 emissions that took place did nothing to lower atmospheric CO2 but did huge amounts of social and economic damage. It is hard to believe that a small fractional increase in global temperature over the last several hundred years could be labeled a “climate emergency”. That label comes from dire climate model forecasts, not from the real world

  4. Current CO2 numbers are fraudulent. Taken from stations above massive volcanic deposits, from a science standpoint those numbers are laughable. Get a real agenda.

    • Clyde Spencer | April 20, 2021 at 9:33 am | Reply

      Tom
      The researchers are aware of contributions of volcanic CO2. They deal with it by establishing a subjective threshold to identify it, and then delete the presumed contaminated data. But, at the same time, they ignore the impact of vegetation removing CO2 as it moves up the slope of the mountain.

      Rather than excluding data, I’d be more comfortable if they just presented everything that they measure. It would then be more obvious just how inherently noisy the data are.

    • Tom… CO2 is measured from many stations in the Pacifc at all latitudes from Pole to pole. The input from a volcanic source is trivial . The problem is not the amount of CO2 that humans have added for their benefit and lifestyles, it is those who have models that predict dire consequences if we keep it up. As I tried to point out earlier there is nothing that can realistically be done about it that makes any sense. We cannot reduce what’s already out there. The geological evidence shows that it won’t matter. The climate was mild in the past when CO2 was more than double what is is now.

  5. 40 billion tons * 100/ton
    4 trillion cost. What can you sell a ton of co2 for and who needs 40 billion tons of it, or more, since we have to reduce what’s in the air already.
    Don’t have kids, humans will be extinct by 2100.

  6. Brett Franklin Swain | August 21, 2021 at 5:01 pm | Reply

    I have been working to help this problem for over 40 years and we belive we have the answer we have the “Powerball” this is a 5 foot Diameter Sphere that Contains Carbon Capturing Technology that Captures Carbon Gases from the Air or Ocean and Converts the Carbon Gas to Hydrogen Gas then the Hydrogen Gas is reduced to its individual Molecular Elements H20 Water and O2 Oxygen as it produces 1000s of Volts of Electricity and Stores the excess Carbon Captured in Air Sealed Containers for Hundreds of years or the Carbon may be recycled and Sold to Companies that already use Carbon in their Products for a further reduction of the Carbon Footprint 👣, We use something very similar to Mosaics technology that is being used by Mosaic we call ours Spongeosium which is in our frame and and the Outer Electraskin Spongiosium Hexaplates that are covering the Hexaframes of our Powerball. I really wish that we could talk to Mosaic about a possible partnership I believe we may could work together to make a Hybrid System to have the best possible product together, with our working together we would achieve the best of all Worlds with your extra Carbon Storage Capabilites and our Solarelectric Solarcell Powerball Power Production/Storage System we offer Carbon Gas Capture, Clean Natural “White” Hydrogen Gas Production, Huge Amounts Electrical Production/Storage, O2 Oxygen Production, H2o Water Production, and Carbon Recycling ♻️. The individual Powerballs of the Home and Business will take the Carbon Gases out of the Air directly and uses the Bio-Water out of the house run it through our System and decontaminate and Recycle ♻️ the Home or Businesses Water. The Industrial Powerball fits right over the Factories Fluie Smoke Stacks and Grabs the Carbon Gas out of the Chamber of the 40 foot Diameter Hollow Industrial Powerball. The Agriculture Model puts Red Grow Light into the Crops of the fields for 5 hours then sprays Water that is produced by our System 360 degrees for the other three hours of Darkness. Plant Food is added to the Water as it sprays the fluid into the Fields this will cover a 3 acre radius. Give me a call and we will talk Mosaic. Thankyou
    Brett Franklin Swain Inventor
    CASA CIVILIAN AERONAUTIC SPACE AGENCY
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
    601-686-5949
    8165 hiway 492 Union MS 39365
    ALPHA+OMEGA=INFINITY

  7. That’a all well and good but, what about water? an equal amount of water is created and that’s a greenhouse gas too.

  8. Steve Nordquist | October 15, 2021 at 7:28 pm | Reply

    Yeah, I’m counting on MOFs to bring carbon capture to the agriculture and Distribution sectors so it’s not all well capture and megaprojects. From then maybe getting water to places whose climate has gotten drier can be fixed without 1930 CO2 levels quite drawn down to yet can be addressed.

  9. Planting trees anywhere they will grow removes CO2 from the air for decades to come while feeding people and animals. The cost is less than $10/metric ton. The food is the paycheck for the tree owners.

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