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DIRECT AIR CAPTURE OF CO2

Organic agents offer innovation

Nature Energy volume 3, pages 539–540 (2018)Cite this article

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Capturing CO2 directly from the air could lead to negative emissions, but more efficient technologies are still required. Now, researchers use a multi-stage cycle based on amino acids and organic salts to capture CO2 from air, which can be released with concentrated solar power.

Due to the continued global reliance on fossil energy, it is now projected1 that avoiding some of the most significant consequences of climate change will require negative CO2 emissions technologies (NETs) to be implemented. Therefore, new approaches for the direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere (direct air capture, DAC) are being sought. Manufactured DAC technologies, whereby chemical processes are used to extract CO2 from the ambient air, represent some of the most scalable ways of slowing the atmospheric temperature rise due to CO2, and could ultimately lead to atmospheric CO2 concentration reductions if the technologies are deployed on a large scale while coupled with geologic sequestration. Now, writing in Nature Energy, Radu Custelcean and co-workers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory develop a solution-based approach for DAC that may contribute to more energy-efficient DAC technologies2.

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Fig. 1: Process path for CO2 extraction from ambient air to produce a concentrated CO2 product.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Christopher W. Jones

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  1. Christopher W. Jones
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Correspondence to Christopher W. Jones.

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Competing interests

The author holds stock in a company that pursues direct air capture. The company is privately held and deploys technology different from that disclosed in ref. 2. The author has no managerial control of the company.

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Jones, C.W. Organic agents offer innovation. Nat Energy 3, 539–540 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-018-0170-8

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