UC Berkeley announced a major breakthrough, one that promises to be a game-changer for carbon capture endeavors, one of the leading weapons in the fight against climate change.

Governments around the world are struggling to meet emissions and climate change goals. Various factors are posing issues, including the energy requirements of AI models, dampened enthusiasm for EVs, and some jurisdictions continuing to deny the very existence of the problem. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the leading components of climate change, with many mitigation efforts centered on reducing or capturing CO2.

According to Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, the university’s chemists have created a new porous organic material—a covalent organic framework (COF)—that is far more effective at capturing carbon than anything currently available.

“We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO2. Everything,” said Yaghi.

“I am excited about it because there’s nothing like it out there in terms of performance. It breaks new ground in our efforts to address the climate problem,” he added.

The new material is so effective that less than half a pound of it can capture as much as 44 pounds of CO2 in a year, the same amount captured by a tree.

“Flue gas capture is a way to slow down climate change because you are trying not to release CO2 to the air. Direct air capture is a method to take us back to like it was 100 or more years ago,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou. “Currently, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is more than 420 ppm, but that will increase to maybe 500 or 550 before we fully develop and employ flue gas capture. So if we want to decrease the concentration and go back to maybe 400 or 300 ppm, we have to use direct air capture.”

Best of all, the new material can easily be incorporated into existing carbon capture system, making it a cost-effective upgrade to systems currently in use. The new COF also has advantages over existing methods since it takes less energy to use.

“Trapping CO2 from air is a very challenging problem,” Yaghi said. “It’s energetically demanding, you need a material that has high carbon dioxide capacity, that’s highly selective, that’s water stable, oxidatively stable, recyclable. It needs to have a low regeneration temperature and needs to be scalable. It’s a tall order for a material. And in general, what has been deployed as of today are amine solutions, which are energy intensive because they’re based on having amines in water, and water requires a lot of energy to heat up, or solid materials that ultimately degrade with time.”

“This COF has a strong chemically and thermally stable backbone, it requires less energy, and we have shown it can withstand 100 cycles with no loss of capacity. No other material has been shown to perform like that,” Yaghi added. “It’s basically the best material out there for direct air capture.”