I think “breakthrough” just refers to their method of measurement. The abstract has the same figure without the “breakthrough” language:
The coordination of polyamine and cyanuric acid modification endows MNNs with high adsorption capacity (1.82 millimoles per gram at 1 bar)
And what do you do with those chemicals once they’re saturated? Replace them with more of the chemicals, I assume. Where do these chemicals come from? Can you make more, without generating more carbon dioxide?
This looks to me like the sort of “promising new technology” that fossil-fuel companies invest in so they can pretend they’re doing something, even though they know they’re completely useless.
I don’t like being pessimistic, but I have to agree with you. We’re gonna need a bigger solution…
The article actually has the funding information:
Funding Information
U.S. Department of Energy: DE-AC02-76SF00515
U.S. Department of Energy
Amherst College
Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this kind of research as such. But it definitely needs to be treated more critically. And the research team should be more careful about their claims of practicality.
In the world of Catalysis/Adsorption/Absorption breakthrough refers to :
Say you have a packed bed, like a cylinder with the pebbles of the stuff under consideration here ( think of it like a filter). The gas flows through this packed bed and the CO2 gets absorbed in the pebbles. So you keep flowing the CO2 loaded gas from one end and you get CO2 free gas on the other end.
After some time, the bed will get “saturated” with CO2, and CO2 will start showing up in the exit gas. This is referred to as breakthrough. Literally, CO2 is breaking through the material.
You have 1.8 mmol/g (1 mol of CO2 = 44g, so 1.8 milli mol of CO2, means about 0.08 grams of CO2 is adsorbed per gram of the material.
Or 1 lb of the material will get rid of 0.08 lb (about 1.3 oz) of CO2.
There are 100s of such materials claimed by many researchers every year, but there already are proven CO2 absorption/adsorption media available commercially with more than 50+ years of operating experience. Unless there is a super breakthrough, these materials are only academically interesting.
Science journalism strikes again. The actual paper doesn’t say anything about vehicles because it’s designing an adsorbent for power plant flue gas. Not your fault.
The dominant tech is an anime wash that is thermally regenerated. Ideally, one uses a material with both a low heat capacity and heat of adsorption. The new material in the paper has a lower heat of adsorption than some other recent materials. They don’t model full-scale operation so I couldn’t tell you how its efficiency compares to other options.
No. It works like a standard sorbent.
Can someone explain what this means?
Put an amine in water. Spray it through the power plant exhaust. The amine reacts with carbon dioxide. Pump the solution away. Heat it. Concentrated CO2 comes out. Reuse the solution.
Then you have to do something with the CO2.
Thank you. The misspelling was blocking my Google searches.
I’m no expert, but it sounds like The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.
I’m glad @Ruken returned to clarify that they meant amine, not anime.
In that case the regeneration process involves tentacles.
Agreed and this is very true.
What does work for southern US is geo based heat pumps. The temperature a few feet underground is pretty cool in the southern us (much like the frost line in the Northern US). If instead of moving heat to the air (which is 100+ F in summer, the ac can move the heat a few feet in the ground which is like 70F, there is a big saving in power).
Also, it should work for northern places in the winter too i.e. pipes buried a few feet in the ground (below the frost line) will reduce the power demand of a heat pump.
There are many such designs, one simple one is to bury a lot of pipes in the ground.
The problem is - you capture all this CO2. If you’re really lucky, there’s a way to turn it into C (pure carbon).
The obvious follow-up question is - now what? You can capture carbon as trees, and then for maybe 100 years they sit there sufficiently moist not to burn. You can create peat moss, if the climate is wet enough.
But generally organic matter will either rot or burn, thus putting the problem on a future generation.
There are suggestions it can be turned into solid CO2 and buried in the bottom of the ocean. (Can it? how stable is that?) Or pumped into the earth. Is there enough carrying capacity? We’ve pumped oil out of the ground on the order of millions of barrels a day, and coal just as badly - is there a place to put this back, even if there is a process to capture and transform it on such a scale?
Maybe we can’t do it now, but it’s the only solution that will last in the long term.
If you grow trees, you can use the wood to make charcoal by heating it without air:
I expect charcoal is rather resistant to rot, but of course it’s rather combustible. Its low density means you couldn’t easily sink it in the ocean, so you’d need to bury it somewhere. The Hambach surface mine seems like a good candidate.
It’s not in the paper, but the journalist didn’t make it up. It quotes the lead author:
“In this study, we focused on cheaper material design for capture and storage and elucidating the interaction mechanism between CO2 and the material,” lead author Dr Haiyan Mao from UC Berkeley said in a statement.
“This work creates a general industrialization method towards sustainable CO2 capture using porous networks. We hope we can design a future attachment for capturing car exhaust gas, or maybe an attachment to a building or even a coating on the surface of furniture.”
I don’t 100% blame the author either, because it seems we’re in an environment where scientists have to come up with justifications for their work, no matter how dumb. Saying “we’re just in it for the science” doesn’t seem to play well with their funding sources.
Anyway, CO2 exhaust capture is dumb either way. It’s not possible to invent a better form of sequestered carbon than coal. It’s almost pure carbon, in a very stable solid form, already buried deep underground. It’ll stay there with no effort for millions of years. It’s perfect! All we have to do is to not dig it up and burn it. And the second-best form of sequestered carbon is oil. (CO2 capture might make sense for the carbon we’ve already burned, but we’ll see how that goes)
It’s in the news release but the university PR department may very well have written it based on my experience. And even if the postdoc did say it, reporting on what some postdoc says* instead of the actual science in the paper that other scientists at least nominally signed off on is why we get bad articles like this.
*Furniture coatings? I know one of the other authors on the paper and am going to give him crap about this.
Scene: a small, dingy university conference room
University PR department: We have to make this look good. No one cares about anime.
Lowly postdoc: Amines.
PR: Whatever. Tell us what this is useful for or we cut your… funding.
Postdoc: I don’t know! Um, power plants. Vehicle exhaust.
PR: Not enough. Give us more.
Postdoc: Uh… <glances nervously around room> furniture… coatings.
PR: Good enough. You may go… for now.
I’ll try the other questions later, but this one is a low hanging fruit 
0.3714 million metric tons of CO2 are produced per million barrels of crude Oil (https://climateaccountability.org/pdf/Sums/Oil%20Sums/Oil%20EmissionFactorCalc%206p.pdf)
or, 0.4 (round numbers) metric tons of CO2 are produced per barrel of crude Oil
Or 400 kg of CO2 are produced per barrel of crude oil.
CO2 is stored in earth between 2500 to 3000 psi where its density is almost the same as water (1000 kg /m3)
So 0.4 m3 of space is needed in earth for storing the CO2 from 1 barrel of crude
So about 2.5 barrels of space is needed inside the earth to store the CO2 emissions from 1 barrel of crude.
Or put in another way, 2.5 years of Oil production" space" is needed for storing a year’s worth of Oil based CO2 production.