Carbon Capture Breakthrough?

Although I am on sabbatical, I think we all need some hope and I wanted to share something that I found hopeful, a new way to capture carbon from the air. This new material was published in an article in the prestigious journal Nature on 10/23/24, so it is peer reviewed, real science.

The research into this new material was done at UC Berkeley, and they released a great summary, though it is somewhat technical.

From the summary:

 “‘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 Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper that will appear online Oct. 23 in the journal Nature.

“‘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.”

We have seen false promises and false starts. There is always the question of whether the technology can be scaled up enough to make a real world difference. And with carbon capture we can be lulled into getting cocky and greedy simply overwhelming the technology with more carbon and more pollution getting that carbon.

But today I am not in a cynical mood. I hope this is the start of something big.