In the wake of last week's UN global climate agreement, it's never been clearer that we're on the path to a zero carbon-emission future. Today, scientists announced the creation of a radical new carbon dioxide-absorbing material which may help us cut down our carbon emissions quicker than we expected.

"Clearly, one of the long-term goals [of our species] is to entirely switch to renewable energy sources like solar and wind power," says Phil De Luna, a materials scientist at the University of Ottawa. "But the reality is that, right now, renewables still form only a small fraction of our global power supply. In emerging counties, where coal power is still the cheapest form of energy by far, and likely will be for a while, we're asking ourselves: how can we can heavily mitigate those power plants' CO2 emissions in the medium-term?"

De Luna is part of a research team headed by Shyamapada Nandi—a chemist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, India—that has just created and tested the fascinating new carbon dioxide-absorbing material, which is outlined today in the journal Science Advances. "You can think of it like a molecular sponge, one that has a lot of really tiny pores," De Luna says. It works by absorbing and releasing carbon dioxide when subjected to various pressures.

A Material Breakthrough

The new material designed by Nandi, De Luna, and their colleagues is a breakthrough in a class of materials called metal organic frameworks, or MOFs. Basically, a MOF is a repeating latticework of metal atoms—in this case, nickel atoms—that has other simple molecules attached at the metal's joints. To oversimplify it even further: It's a crystal with lots of tiny holes.

The idea behind using these materials to soak up CO2 is that (with the right material makeup and under the right conditions) CO2 molecules could conceivably pack themselves tightly into those crevices, forming weak bonds, which could be broken later to exhale the absorbed gas.

Over the last few decades scientists worldwide have discovered and crafted increasingly interesting MOFs with carbon storage abilities. But there have been major practical problems with each. Some MOFs degrade in the presence of water vapor, a real killer for use in humid environments like coal and natural gas plant flues. Some won't absorb much CO2, or require crazy high pressure to do so. Some are so difficult to make or are made from costly materials that are just too expensive for any real-world use. Incredibly, De Luna's new material has none of these problems.

"It's really quite simple to synthesize in a one-pot process," says De Luna, who notes that the only two ingredients required to make the material (nickel metal and an organic material called pyridylcarboxylate) are cheap. As for the potential degrading effects of water vapor? It doesn't effect the new material at all. There's simply nowhere on this MOF for water vapor to grab on. "To sum it up, our material is very stable, easy to synthesize, highly scalable, and has great CO2 capture properties at high pressures. All four of these qualities make it an ideal candidate for industrial use," says De Luna.

Under Pressure

The new material has been specially designed to suck up carbon dioxide gas under the modest to high pressures, the kind you might find in the vents—or flues—of a coal, natural gas, or coal gas power plant. The material works the absolute best at higher pressures (5 to 10 bar), exactly the conditions at which you could scrub CO2 out of coal gas before it is burned.

Coal gas is a hodgepodge gas mixture created when coal is heated under pressure in the presence of water vapor—and De Luna's material can absorb twice as much CO2 from this mix as the best commercially-used approaches. That, and it can release it later while using far, far less energy. Today's best carbon absorbers (such as zeolite 13X) require intense heating to release their trapped gasses, but this new material exhales CO2 under a nothing but a modest vacuum.

"What's exciting is that this material could be retrofitted onto existing power plants," says De Luna. The material consists of many small crystals, and looks like salt. Crushed up into pellets, they would be deployed into a system that could, in many ways, look and act like your car's catalytic converter.

Tiny Pores, Big Absorption

The beauty behind the new materials' CO2 soaking abilities basically boil down to its tiny, tiny pores. "That seems counter-intuitive, right?" says De Luna. "How can something hold more CO2 because it has smaller, not larger, pores?"

Well, according to De Luna—whose research focused on the 3D chemistry of why the MOF could inhale so much CO2—the new material's pores each act like fantastically dense little CO2 parking garages. "There's an incredibly high density of binding sites for CO2 molecules in each pore, and the material also shows a property we call cooperative binding." That means that when a CO2 molecule nestles into one of the material's many pores, it also encourages incoming CO2 molecules to move in with it. Each CO2 molecule reduces the energy cost of its neighbors moving in.

As with other, currently existing carbon capture technologies, the CO2 potentially plucked from fossil fuel plants by De Luna's new material could be either re-purposed for manufacturing use (for example, carbonating your beer), or squirreled away. Right now, most captured CO2 is hidden away in dry, sealed and hard-to-reach oil wells.

De Luna says the next step for this technology will be up to the fuel plants, who will need to find ways to retrofit old power plants or integrate the new material into new ones. "I'd honestly say the biggest barrier for this technology is simple industry enthusiasm," he says. Because the material works much better than any commercially available option at high (5-10 bar) pressures, like those found at coal gas plants, that's likely where it'll first be deployed. De Luna says he imagines that other, future incarnations of this technology could be tuned for even better uptake at lower pressure; potentially offering equally stunning properties for regular coal plants, or natural gas burning power plants.

"Here's my takeaway. This material shows extremely high CO2 capture capacity while being stable, cheap, and scalable. It represents a great strategy for medium-term CO2 emissions reductions," says De Luna. "It's not the end all of this technology, but it's a breakthrough."

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io