Efficient, inexpensive carbon capture technology would be an absolute game-changer when it comes to limiting and potentially reversing the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Researchers at a Japanese university recently made a giant leap toward making carbon capture more efficient and cheaper.
Researchers at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences and National Taiwan University's Department of Chemical Engineering published a paper outlining their exciting development.
They've come up with a way to make gas separation, crucial for carbon capture, a far less energy-intensive process. Chemists long ago learned how to separate CO2 from other gases, but with existing technology, it's a highly energy-intensive process, according to SciTechDaily.
The researchers appear to have solved this problem by developing a unique membrane: one that can change from a liquid to a solid glass or crystalline structure when it's subjected to different temperatures.
The exciting part is that as a liquid, the membrane has high permeability and can efficiently capture CO2, separating it from other gases like hydrogen.
The membrane is made of metal-organic polyhedra (MOP) with polyethylene glycol (PEG) chains. The membrane's alterable structure, which enables it to be tailored for separating particular gases, can be "precisely tuned for gas permeability," according to SciTechDaily. In addition to separating CO2, the membrane can also be altered to select for many different gases.
This way, a factory could tweak the membrane to capture particular gases the facility might be emitting into the atmosphere.
The technology has great potential, but it first needs to be scaled up quickly to begin helping prevent runaway carbon emissions.
"The next challenge is scaling up production to make this membrane technology feasible for large-scale applications," Professor Dun-Yen Kang at National Taiwan University told SciTechDaily.
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Never 👎 Finding ways to reduce carbon emissions from all sources is — in the long run — far more important than learning how to more efficiently filter the emissions of an industrial operation. Making it cheaper and easier to scrub CO2 waste from emissions is a good step in the right direction.
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