New ions prove effective for new carbon-capture technique

Even as the world slowly begins to decarbonize its industrial processes, achieving lower concentrations of atmospheric carbon requires technologies that can remove existing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere – rather than just prevent the creation of it.

Typical carbon capture takes CO₂ directly from the source of a carbon-intensive process. Ambient carbon capture, or direct air capture (DAC), on the other hand, can take carbon out of typical environmental conditions and serves as another weapon in the battle against climate change. It is set to become even more important as the world’s reliance on fossil fuels begins to decrease and, with it, the need for point-of-source carbon capture.

Now, researchers at Northwestern University have investigated a novel approach to capturing carbon from ambient environmental conditions. They looked at the relationship between water and CO₂ in the ‘moisture-swing technique, which captures CO₂ at low humidities and releases it at high humidities. This approach incorporates innovative kinetic methodologies and a diversity of ions, allowing carbon removal from virtually anywhere. The researchers report their findings in a paper in Environmental Science & Technology.

“We are not only expanding and optimizing the choice of ions for carbon capture, but also helping unravel the fundamental underpinnings of complex fluid-surface interactions,” said Vinayak Dravid, a senior author of the paper. “This work advances our collective understanding of DAC, and our data and analyses provide a strong impetus to the community, for theorists and experimentalists alike, to further improve carbon capture under practical conditions.”

Dravid is a professor of materials science and engineering in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and director of global initiatives at the International Institute for Nanotechnology. PhD students, John Hegarty and Benjamin Shindel, were the paper’s co-first authors.

According to Shindel, the idea behind the paper came from a desire to use ambient environmental conditions to facilitate the reaction. “We liked moisture-swing carbon capture because it doesn't have a defined energy cost,” he said. “Even though there’s some amount of energy required to humidify a volume of air, ideally you could get humidity ‘for free,’ energetically, by relying on an environment that has natural dry and wet reservoirs of air close together.”

The group also expanded the number of ions used to make the reaction possible. “Not only have we doubled the number of ions that exhibit the desired humidity-dependent carbon capture, we have also discovered the highest-performing systems yet,” said Hegarty.

In recent years, moisture-swing capture has taken off. Traditional carbon capture methods use sorbents to capture CO₂ at point-of-source locations, and then use heat or generated vacuums to release the CO₂ from the sorbent. But this comes with a high-energy cost.

“Traditional carbon capture holds onto CO₂ tightly, which means it takes significant energy to release it and reuse it,” Hegarty said.

It also doesn’t work everywhere. Agriculture, concrete and steel manufacturers, for example, are major contributors to emissions but have large footprints that make it impossible to capture carbon at a single source.

Another senior author, chemistry professor Omar Farha, has experience at developing metal-oxide framework (MOF) structures for diverse applications, including CO₂ capture and sequestration.

“DAC is a complex and multifaceted problem that requires an interdisciplinary approach,” Farha said. “What I appreciate about this work is the detailed and careful measurements of complex parameters. Any proposed mechanism must explain these intricate observations."

In the past, researchers have zeroed in on carbonate and phosphate ions to facilitate moisture-swing capture and have specific hypotheses relating to why these specific ions are effective. But Dravid’s team wanted to test a wider breadth of ions to see which were the most effective. Overall, they found ions with the highest valency – mostly phosphates – were most effective and they began going down a list of polyvalent ions, ruling out some, as well as finding new ions that worked for this application, including silicate and borate.

The team believes that future experiments, coupled with computational modeling, will help better explain why certain ions are more effective than others.

There are already companies working to commercialize DAC, using carbon credits to incentivize companies to offset their emissions. Many are capturing carbon that would already have been captured through activities such as modified agricultural practices, whereas this approach unambiguously sequesters CO₂ directly from the atmosphere, where it could then be concentrated and ultimately stored or reused.

Dravid’s team plans to integrate such CO₂-capturing materials with their previous porous sponge platform, which has been developed to remove environmental toxins including oil, phosphates and microplastics.

This story is adapted from material from Northwestern University, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.