A new material can capture carbon from waste streams as hot as 300°C, a potential step forward in decarbonizing industries such as cement and steel manufacturing.
Most carbon capture technologies in use or under study today can’t operate at more than about 100°C. The aqueous amine technology that is most widely used is only functional at about 60°C or less. Many effluent streams are much hotter, meaning the only way to remove carbon at the source is to cool the streams first, a step that takes energy and money.
But a new metal-organic framework (MOF) could change that. The material, studded with zinc hydride sites to bind carbon dioxide, operates under high temperatures. In tests at 280°C, the MOF captured 90% of carbon from both high-concentration streams (20% CO2, similar to waste streams in the iron and steel industries) and low-concentration streams (4% CO2, similar to post-combustion streams in natural gas plants). The CO2 reacts with the zinc hydride to generate formate.
“One of the main things that we learned here is that high-temperature gas capture is possible if you can use molecular reactivity in a porous material,” says study senior author Jeffrey Long, a professor of chemistry at the Univ. of California, Berkeley...
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