COF captures carbon from air

As the levels of carbon dioxide in the environment rapidly rise and the climate consequences of that rise become increasingly apparent, research and investment into carbon capture strategies have also picked up momentum. “Carbon capture is the problem of our society today . . . it’s also a fantastic chemistry problem,” says Omar Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley, who has been working on networked materials for carbon capture and water harvesting since the 1990s. Direct air capture (DAC) aims to remove CO 2 from ambient air using weak bases. The captured CO 2 can then be sequestered or used for industrial applications . But current materials for DAC tend to require a lot of energy to recover the captured CO 2 , a problem Yaghi and many other researchers are working to address. Yaghi and his team have now invented a new covalent organic framework (COF) for open-air