New compound provides a better cage for carbon dioxide

Capturing carbon dioxide is simple chemistry. In fact, you may have seen it in your high school chem lab. Remember that tightly sealed bottle of sodium hydroxide, aka lye? Simply popping the top off that strong base and exposing it to air resulted in a chemical reaction in which the ambient CO2 was absorbed and the lye became sodium carbonate.

So it would seem like carbon capture and storage might be relatively simple—thus neatly solving global climate change.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple, largely because getting the CO2 back out of any of a number of different materials put forward over the years has proven energy-intensive. For example, getting CO2 out of carbonate requires heating to more than 900 degrees Celsius in an industrial kiln.

However, in the November 30 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, chemists at the University of California, Los Angeles, (U.C.L.A.) report the discovery of a new compound—affectionately known as Mg-MOF-74—that readily traps CO2 and then releases 87 percent of it at room temperature. “If we continue to blow, we blow the CO2 back off again,” says U.C.L.A. chemist David Britt, lead author on the paper presenting the results.

The molecular lattice can absorb roughly 9 percent of its weight in CO2, and heating to a relatively mild 80 degrees Celsius releases the rest for your preferred storage option. “Mg-MOF-74 strikes an excellent balance between strong adsorption and ease of regeneration that makes it highly promising as a carbon dioxide capture material,” Britt says.

Read more . . .

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Tags: clean coal, co2 solution, david britt, global climate change, Mg-MOF-74, new patent, patent applications, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, sodium hydroxide, storage option

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, Innovation Needed, Scientific American, climate change, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.