This MOF is hot to go

Industrial flue gases that come from making cement and steel are, as pop star Chappell Roan might put it, hot to go: factories belch them out at temperatures above 200 °C. Scientists have discovered that a metal-organic framework (MOF) studded with zinc hydride can reversibly capture carbon dioxide between 200–300 °C. The finding offers a way to sequester the greenhouse gas without having to cool it, which can be an expensive and energy-intensive process. Using MOFs to capture CO 2 from industrial gas streams has been a longstanding goal and has caught the attention of firms like Baker Hughes and BASF . But MOFs don’t work well at high temperatures. That’s because of entropy—the inescapable thermodynamic law of disorder. “Entropy means gas molecules don’t want to stick to a surface at high temperatures,” says Jeffrey R. Long of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the research. Because CO 2