Atoco featured in the Wall Street Journal
Published in the Wall Street Journal on October 9th 2025 by Perry Cleveland-Peck, the article explores how Atoco tackles both the causes and effects of climate change with nano-engineered reticular materials based on the research of our founder, Nobel Laureate Prof. Omar Yaghi.
Omar Yaghi says he has solved the carbon crisis facing the world today. The Jordanian- American chemistry professor makes this claim in all seriousness.
Oh, and he says he has solved the global water-scarcity crisis, too.
“The issue now,” he says, “is simply engineering.”
Yaghi says the solution to both these planet-sized problems lies in a class of materials he has pioneered called metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. For his work in these crystalline compounds, Yaghi and two of his colleagues on Wednesday were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Yaghi describes MOFs as being like “molecular Lego,” saying, “You take molecular building blocks and stitch them together to form scaffolds that have enormous surface area and highly tunable chemistry.”
The result is like entering a new dimension. A single gram of MOF—which would look much like a sugar cube—can have an internal surface area equivalent to a football field. That’s enough space to trap vast amounts of gas, be it carbon dioxide or water vapor, says Yaghi.
The professor and his colleagues Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson received the Nobel Prize for their work in developing this new form of molecular architecture, which can harvest water from air, capture CO2, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.
Yaghi’s passion for reticular chemistry, the science of linking molecular units into open frameworks, has given rise to what he calls the “air economy”: the idea of harvesting valuable resources like water and carbon directly from the air around us. The concept is gaining traction, thanks in part to Atoco, a startup he founded with Samer Taha, a former telecommunications executive turned clean-tech entrepreneur.
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