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Fast Company: 7 ounces of this yellow powder can capture as much CO₂ as a tree

Fast Company covers COF-999, a new material developed at UC Berkeley that efficiently captures CO₂ from the air; just 7 ounces of this yellow powder can sequester approximately 44 pounds of CO₂ annually, matching the capacity of a large tree.

Article by Adele Peters, published on Fast Company on Nov 1st, 2024.

UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou with a 100-milligram test sample of COF-999; the sample was placed in the analyzer behind him to measure carbon dioxide adsorption from an air mixture similar to that of ambient air.
[Photo: Robert Sanders/UC Berkeley]

Earlier this year, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, filled a device with bright-yellow powder, connected it to a tube, and stuck the tube through the wall of a lab. Over the next 20 days, they used the material to pull CO₂ from the outdoor air. Then they extracted the CO₂ from the powder, repeating the process 100 times.

The material traps greenhouse gas inside billions of tiny pores; just 7 ounces of it can capture around 44 pounds of CO₂ in a year, roughly as much as a large tree. Because the material is energy-efficient to use and unusually durable, it could help significantly cut the cost of direct air capture plants that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

 

The challenge is huge. CO₂ levels in the atmosphere hit a record high this year, helping drive extreme weather, from heat waves to hurricanes. Even if all new emissions stopped now, there would still be hundreds of billions of tons of old emissions in the atmosphere that need to be removed to help stabilize the climate. Sucking CO₂ out of the air is as necessary as decarbonizing the economy. But the direct air capture tech in use now is too expensive to be viable at a large scale.

 

Early generations of direct air capture tech used a liquid to capture CO₂, but the process used large amounts of energy (and the liquids themselves were toxic, posing a challenge for disposal). Some companies now use solid materials, which partially reduces energy use, but those materials don’t last long enough.

 

One key way the new material can cut costs: It can be used repeatedly without degrading. “When you have a good material and you’re cycling for a long time, that means the whole process becomes cheaper,” says Omar Yaghi, the chemistry professor at UC Berkeley who led the development of the material, called COF-999. (COF stands for “covalent organic framework,” an extra-strong chemical structure that Yaghi’s lab developed.)

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