A half-pound of this yellow powder can capture as much CO2 as a tree in a year. Is this the secret weapon against climate change we've all been waiting for?
It's like grinding the carbon dioxide capture of trees into a powder.
At UC Berkeley, scientists are tinkering with something that looks unremarkable — a fluffy yellow powder. But don’t let appearances fool you. This powder could be a key weapon in the fight against climate change.
The material, known as COF-999, has the ability to trap carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas driving global warming — far more efficiently than even trees. In fact, just half a pound of the powder can do the work of a large tree over the course of a year.
The powder is lightweight and porous, capturing CO2 in its microscopic holes. Unlike other similar materials, it can repeat the process hundreds of times without breaking down. That kind of durability is rare, but the team’s tests suggest COF-999 can keep going for much longer.
“It performs beautifully,” Omar Yaghi, the study’s senior author and a reticular chemist at Berkeley, told LA Times. “We think it will go to thousands of cycles.”
A New Hope in Carbon Capture
If we’re to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, scientists say we need to do more than just cut emissions — we have to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the air. Forests do this naturally, but they can only take in so much. Direct air capture technology — machines that suck CO2 from the atmosphere — is emerging as one possible solution.
The yellow powder, COF-999, could supercharge this effort. Packed with microscopic pores, it acts like a sponge for carbon dioxide. Air flows through the powder, but the carbon dioxide gets trapped by chemicals called amines, which bind to the gas until heat is applied. Once released, the carbon can be stored underground, and the powder is ready to absorb more.
“It’s really a new family of approaches,” said Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research. He sees potential in COF-999’s ability to make carbon capture both faster and cheaper.
Zihui Zhou, the study’s lead author and a materials chemist, packed the powder into a stainless steel tube and exposed it to outdoor air for 20 days. The powder captured every bit of carbon dioxide from the air, even as CO2 levels fluctuated. When the air left the tube, there was no detectable CO2 left. According to the researchers, the powder can capture CO2 10 times faster than with any other material.
Beyond Trees: The Next Step in Climate Tech
The race to develop carbon capture technologies is heating up. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is around 423 parts per million. It’s now edging dangerously close to the 450 ppm threshold that scientists warn could trigger catastrophic warming. Even if we halt emissions tomorrow, the CO2 already in the air will continue to warm the planet for decades; perhaps even centuries — no one is really sure how long CO2 stays in the atmosphere before it breaks down.
“You have to take CO2 from the air — there’s no way around it,” said Yaghi.
The beauty of COF-999 lies in its efficiency and robustness. While other carbon capture materials must be heated to 250 degrees Fahrenheit to release the trapped carbon somewhere safe, COF-999 requires only 140 degrees. That small difference could mean big energy savings on an industrial scale.
Yaghi’s team isn’t stopping here. They’re already working on a new version of COF-999 that could have double the carbon capture capacity in the next year. The powder’s potential is so promising that Yaghi founded a company to bring it to market, with hopes that direct air capture plants will soon rely on the material to make a dent in atmospheric CO2.
Next Steps
The challenge now is scaling up. While the material itself is relatively cheap, turning it into a solution for the planet will require sprawling industrial facilities. Imagine vast metal structures filled with trays of COF-999, all working to capture carbon from the air. These plants, filled with fans and towering columns, may resemble oil refineries or chemical plants. And we would maybe need thousands of these across the world — that’s the kind of scale we’re talking about if we’re serious about reversing the worst effects of climate change.
There’s still much to be done though. As Lackner pointed out, the entire direct air capture process will need to become 10 times cheaper to be viable on a global scale. “There are a thousand things that feed into this,” he said, “but this is a great step.”
For now, COF-999 offers a glimpse of a future where a seemingly simple powder could help us tackle the world’s most pressing environmental challenge. It may not look like much, but this fluffy yellow material just might be able to do the work of a forest — and then some.
The findings appeared in the journal Nature.
