Charged Adsorbents for Capture of Carbon Dioxide Directly from Air

We face a global climate change crisis. A wide range of greenhouse gas mitigation technologies must be deployed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius at the end of the century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has further emphasised the need for negative emissions technologies, which remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A promising approach for carbon dioxide removal is direct air capture. In this approach carbon dioxide is absorbed directly from the air using a sponge-like material. The carbon dioxide is then collected and stored in the ground, or used as a chemical building block. Despite the promise of this approach, the associated cost of carbon removal remains very high and improved materials are needed that can lower the cost of this process.

In this project we will develop an entirely new class of sponge-like materials with excellent performance for the capture of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. We will develop a new approach to make these materials that uses electric charging to tailor the material composition and add reactive chemical groups. We predict that our new materials will be able to bind large quantities of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. Excitingly, our new strategy for preparing functional sponge-like materials will eventually lead to an entirely new family of materials with applications in a range of energy efficient chemical processes.