Michael Goi
A Dash-operated zero-emissions battery bus in the foreground with a Los Angeles Metro Compressed Natural Gas bus emitting pollutants in the background.
In October 2024, chemists at the University of California, Berkley, on its school news website, as reported by Robert Sanders and in the journal Nature, stated that it had “A new type of porous material called a covalent organic framework quickly sucks up carbon dioxide from ambient air” and that this “…new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions.”
The material developed captures carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air without disrupting other things, such as water, which is one limitation of existing air capture technology, otherwise known as DAC.
Covalent organic frameworks (COF) are “…rigid crystalline structures with regularly spaced internal pores that provide a large surface area for gases to stick or adsorb.”
The paper’s senior author is Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley.
With funding for the material coming from “King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, Yaghi’s carbon capture startup, Atoco Inc., Fifth Generation’s Love, Tito’s, and BIDMaP. Yaghi’s collaborators include Joachim Sauer, a visiting scholar from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and computational scientist Laura Gagliardi from the University of Chicago.”