Chemists at UC Berkeley have just published details of a yearslong project to create a material that will effectively, sustainably remove carbon dioxide from the air, in what is potentially a major, Nobel-worthy breakthrough.

Scientists around the globe have been working on technologies to achive direct air capture or DAC, in order to reverse the rising tide of carbon dioxide that is fuel climate change. Now a team at UC Berkeley says it has come up with a porous material, known as a covalent organic framework (COF), that efficiently removes carbon dioxide from the air and can be continuously reused.

"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," says Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, speaking to UC Berkeley News. Yaghi authored a paper, along with graduate student Zihui Zhou, about their finding that was published late last month in the journal Nature.

"I am excited about it because there’s nothing like it out there in terms of performance," Yaghi adds. "It breaks new ground in our efforts to address the climate problem."

The material has been called COF-999, and Yaghi says it can be swapped into existing carbon-capture systems, like those at industrial refineries and elsewhere, and can be used in entirely new ways as well.

"Direct air capture is a method to take us back to [Earth] like it was 100 or more years ago," says Zhou, adding that half a pound of COF-999 can remove as much CO₂ from the air in one year as a tree — 44 pounds worth.

Zhou adds that existing flue-gas-capture technology in far inferior, and will not get us to our emission-reduction goals.

"Currently, the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere is more than 420 ppm (parts per million), but that will increase to maybe 500 or 550 before we fully develop and employ flue gas capture," Zhou tells UC Berkeley News. "So if we want to decrease the concentration and go back to maybe 400 or 300 ppm, we have to use direct air capture."

Yaghi also explains how COF-999 can be reused. "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," Yaghi tells UC Berkeley News. He explains that the material can absorb the carbon from 400 ppm air in about two hours at room temperature. But then if you heat the material to a low temperature, 140 degrees Fahrenheit, it releases that CO₂ and can be used like a sponge again.

And, Yaghi says, they plan to use AI to help develop even more efficient COFs so that more widespread, easily deployable carbon capture systems can be created.

Yaghi and Zhou's work, interestingly, is partly being funded by Tito's Vodka, along with King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, Yaghi’s carbon capture startup Atoco Inc., BIDMaP, and Fifth Generation Love.

Expect to see Yaghi's and Zhou's names in the news even more, if all that they say proves true about this technology.

Top image: Photo courtesy of Zihui Zhou, UC Berkeley