It captures CO2 from mixed industrial exhaust or air without needing costly purification.
The device converts the captured CO2 into valuable formic acid in a single step.
This process turns carbon capture from a cost into a potential revenue stream.
It works efficiently with both flue gas and ordinary air, a historic breakthrough.
A team of South Korean researchers has unveiled a novel three-layer electrode that directly captures carbon dioxide from industrial exhaust and even ordinary air, converting it into a useful industrial chemical. This advancement, reported in the journal ACS Energy Letters, moves carbon capture technology from a costly theoretical exercise into the realm of practical, economically viable deployment. The device works efficiently under the messy, mixed-gas conditions of real-world emissions, a historic hurdle that has long stalled scalable solutions.
For years, the promise of carbon capture has been hampered by a fundamental problem: most systems require pure, concentrated streams of CO2 to function. In reality, the flue gas from power plants or factories is a cocktail of nitrogen, oxygen, and other gases. Purifying the CO2 first is an energy-intensive and expensive step, making the entire process inefficient and costly. Furthermore, many technologies merely capture the gas for underground storage, a service with no economic return....<<<Read More>>>...