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To mitigate climate change, direct air capture of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere has emerged as an increasingly attractive option for limiting global warming. But scaling up systems to remove and safely store enough CO₂ faces major obstacles, according to researchers at the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE).

They cite climate models estimating that limiting global warming to less than 2°C could require removing approximately 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually by 2050, increasing to 20 billion tons per year by 2100. Current DAC systems remove only thousands of tons of CO₂ annually.

One challenge is improving the solid sorbents that capture CO₂ from ambient air. In collaboration with CarbonCapture Inc., researchers at ChBE have shown that a simple, one-step modification can upgrade a commercial amine resin into a more efficient and durable sorbent for CO₂ capture. They published their findings in Science Advances.

"Achieving economically viable DAC demands major improvements in solid sorbent design and performance," said study author professor Christopher W. Jones of ChBE, who noted that the benefits of DAC include its potential scalability, modest land-use requirements, flexibility in plant locations and access to extensive geological reservoirs for long-term CO₂ storage.

Jones and his collaborators found a way to improve the performance of Lewatit VP OC 1065, a commercially available resin already considered a benchmark in the DAC field.

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