Researchers developed a material that can safely and cheaply remove greenhouse gas from power-plant emissions.
The promising carbon capture technique is based on simple kitchen-grade baking soda, Harvard University reported.
To make this breakthrough a research team used a microfluidic assembly technique to produce microcapsules that contain liquid absorbing materials (baking soda) encased in polymer shells.
"Microcapsules have been used in a variety of applications - for example, in pharmaceuticals, food flavoring, cosmetics, and agriculture - for controlled delivery and release, but this is one of the first demonstrations of this approach for controlled capture," said Jennifer A. Lewis, the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a co-lead author. Lewis is also a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
Power plants are the single largest contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gas, prompting the Environmental Protection Agency to call for serious action to be taken in lowering these emissions; one of these interventions could include power plants becoming equipped with carbon-trapping technology.
Current carbon-capture technology uses caustic amine-based solvents to remove carbon dioxide front flue gas escaping from a facility's smokestacks. The new microencapsulated carbon sorbents (MECS) are an improvement to this method because they achieve an order-of-magnitude increase in carbon absorption rates compared with current sorbents. Along with being less expensive, they also have an endless shelf life and do not degrade over time like currently-used solvents do.
"MECS provide a new way to capture carbon with fewer environmental issues," said Roger D. Aines, leader of the fuel cycle innovations program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a co-lead author. "Capturing the world's carbon emissions is a huge job. We need technology that can be applied to many kinds of carbon dioxide sources, with the public's full confidence in the safety and sustainability."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature Communications.
