Carbon capture & storage (CCS)
Depiction of a carbon capture materials development pipeline designed by MCSC Impact Fellow Akachukwu (AC) Obi.
When it comes to technological barriers of CCS, the state-of-the-art for CO2 capture is amine solvents. However, even after many years of optimization, commercial amine capture systems still demand 2 GJ or more per ton CO2, several times larger than required by thermodynamics. Furthermore, amines are susceptible to degradation in oxygen-rich post-combustion scenarios like cement production and coal or natural gas power plants. Thus, advances that reduce the energy penalty as well as the degradation rate of capture materials are necessary.
From a logistical perspective, even where mature technologies are directly applicable, projects are often near ~ $1 billion. Forming the right partnerships, taking advantage of government incentives, and cooperating with other industries to build necessary infrastructure are major challenges.
News Highlight
Undergraduate Research Explorations: Soil and Carbon Capture & Storage at the MCSC
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Ongoing Projects
- Redesigning amine-based CO2 capture materials (Obi)
- An MIT research team spanning Materials Science (DMSE), Chemical Engineering (ChemE), Mechanical Engineering (MechE), and Chemistry collaborates to develop a class of energy-efficient, amine-based CO2 capture sorbents.
- Broad screening of CO2 binding (Gomez-Bombarelli)
- Exploring the combinatorial design of energy efficient capture solvents with tunable electronics properties using high throughput DFT.
- Energy transfer mechanisms (Gallant)
- Synthesis and experimental testing of promising amine candidates for CO2 binding strength and other performance metrics. Investigating electrochemical capture and release and efficient energy transfer mechanisms at ambient temperatures.
- Semi-automated synthesis of new molecules for carbon capture (Coley)
- Working to “close the loop” on machine learning-guided chemical synthesis using high throughput automation. Focused on mapping out the reaction space for synthetic route optimization and diverse library synthesis of CO2 capture candidates.
- Fundamental redox events at CO2 (Gilliard)
- Investigating the chemical oxidation and reduction of CO2 stabilized by organic ligands, and developing new strategies for CO2 utilization.
- Kinetic oxidation modeling (Green)
- Has built machine learning models for oxidative degradation of organic molecules and trained it on >150,000 transition state calculations (DFT). Testing model on candidate amines for CO2 capture.
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Who’s studying this
MCSC Impact Fellow
Research Scientist, Amazon Robotics
Member companies participating
