High-performance sorbents for carbon dioxide capture from air
This project has focused on capture of CO 2 from ambient air (“air capture”). If this process is technically and economically feasible, it could potentially contribute to net reduction of CO 2 emissions in ways that are complementary to better developed techniques for CO 2 from concentrated point sources. We focused on cyclic adsorption processes for CO 2 capture from air in which the entire cycle is performed at moderate temperatures. The project involved both experimental studies of sorbent materials and process level modeling of cyclic air capture processes. In our experimental work, a series of amine-functionalized silica adsorbents were prepared and characterized to determine the impact of molecular architecture on CO 2 capture. Some key findings were: • Amine functionalized silicas can be prepared with high enough CO 2 capacities under ambient conditions to merit consideration for use in air capture processes. • Primary amines are better candidates for CO 2 capture than secondary or tertiary amines, both in terms of amine efficiency for CO 2 adsorption and enhanced water affinity. • Mechanistic understanding of degradation of these materials can enable control of molecular architecture to significantly improve material stability. Our process modeling work provided the first publically available cost and energy estimates for cyclic adsorption processes for air capture of CO 2 . Some key findings were: • Cycles based on diurnal ambient heating and cooling cannot yield useful purities or amounts of captured CO 2 . • Cycles based on steam desorption at 110 oC can yield CO 2 purities of ~88%. • The energy requirements for cycles using steam desorption are dominated by needs for thermal input, which results in lower costs than energy input in the form of electricity. Cyclic processes with operational costs of less than $\$$100 tCO 2 -net were described, and these results point to process and material improvements that could substantially reduce these costs. The most critical conclusions from our work are that (i) CO 2 capture from ambient air using moderate temperature cyclic adsorption processes is technically feasible and (ii) the operational costs of realistic versions of these processes are moderate enough to encourage future development of this technology. Because of the very modest net investment that has been made in R&D associated with this approach from all sources worldwide (relative to the massive public and private investment that has been made in technologies for CO 2 from concentrated point sources), our results strongly suggest that continued development of air capture is justified.