A new material developed at UC Berkeley could help bring down the cost of capturing carbon dioxide from the air.
BY Adele Peters3 minute read Earlier this year, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, filled a device with bright-yellow powder, connected it to a tube, and stuck the tube through the wall of a lab. Over the next 20 days, they used the material to pull CO2 from the outdoor air. Then they extracted the CO2 from the powder, repeating the process 100 times. The material traps greenhouse gas inside billions of tiny pores; just 7 ounces of it can capture around 44 pounds of CO2 in a year, roughly as much as a large tree. Because the material is energy-efficient to use and unusually durable, it could help significantly cut the cost of direct air capture plants that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The challenge is huge. CO2 levels in the atmosphere hit a record high this year, helping drive extreme weather, from heat waves to hurricanes. Even if all new emissions stopped now, there would still be hundreds of billions of tons of old…