UC Berkeley team discovers new material to capture CO2: Here's how it works

BERKELEY, Calif. (KGO) -- Staying Climate Ready can often mean innovating new solutions.

A team at the University of California has engineered a microscopic material that can capture the greenhouse gas CO2.

If you wanted to scrub carbon dioxide pollution from the air around us, having a magic sponge would help -- even if it looks a bit more like a tiny jar of powder in its raw form.

"Here is our material and so a yellow powder. And you can see it's just like a baby powder, but more fluffy," said graduate researcher Zihui Zhou, holding a small vial.

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Zhou is with a University of California team, that's developed a new material that can capture CO2 in the low concentrations that make up normal air pollution. The material is known as a COF for Covalent Organic Framework. The team says its microscopic pores can trap CO2 for storage without degrading. To test its efficiency, they literally sucked in air from the Berkeley Campus, through an open window and into a special specialized instrument.

"And we have a relative humidity detector and CO2 detector over here, so we can detect all the concentration of the gas," Zhou said.

The project is just the latest evolution in micro-materials developed in Berkeley's Omar Yaghi lab.

Late last year, the ABC7 News climate team profiled another group of researchers from the lab as they used a similar but different microscopic material, known as a MOF, to capture water from dry desert air of Death Valley.

Yaghi hopes this version can eventually be scaled up to help capture and sequester the critical greenhouse gas.

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"And we've designed them to have very high capacity for CO2. So ultimately, in terms of deploying them, you have to scale them up to multi-ton quantities," he said.

He imagines plants that might be able to capture half a gigaton of CO2 a year. With a little math and a lot of investment, he says that could someday work out to a global solution.

"So, imagine that I put one of these plants in every city where the population is one million or more. OK, now you can in three and a half years, less than three and a half years capture all that extra CO2 out of the air. So, it's possible. I mean, we have done great things like this in our society. Many times. It's just we need leadership and the will to change the way we think and treat this as a crisis, not just a problem," he said.

And for Zihou and the rest of the Berkeley team, it's a chance to turn a solution drawn from their campus window, into a vision for a cleaner future.