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New powder that captures carbon could be ‘quantum leap’ for industry (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Just half a pound of the stuff may remove as much carbon dioxide as a tree can, according to early tests. Once the carbon is absorbed by the powder, it can be released into safe storage or be used in industrial processes, like carbonizing drinks.

“This really addresses a major problem in the tech field, and it gives an opportunity now for us to scale it up and start using it,” says Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s not the first material to absorb carbon, but “it’s a quantum leap ahead [of other compounds] in terms of the durability of the material”.

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[–] PumpkinSkink 8 points 4 days ago

Ok. So we have this covalent organic network material that absorbs carbon. I have four questions: Whats the synthetic route? what's the cost per gram to make it?Where do you put the carbon dioxide after? What's powering the heat to desorb the carbon? Since they published in nature and the paper isn't on scihub atm I'm gonna guess: "expensive, fiddly, and difficult to scale, and actually we asked a grad student to make a kg of it a year ago and he's still working at the 1g scale and failing ", "about 25,000$/g", "We have one identical sentence in both the conclusion and abstract which says a few things we could do, but that we haven't actually tested", and "natural gas, if you're lucky".