Berkeley chemists have created a reusable material that pulls carbon dioxide from the air and holds onto it until it can be stored.
A typical large tree can suck as much as 40 kilograms of carbon dioxide out of the air over the course of a year. Now scientists at UC Berkeley say they can do the same job with less than half a pound of a fluffy yellow powder. The powder was designed to trap the greenhouse gas in its microscopic pores, then release it when it's ready to be squirreled away someplace where it can't contribute to global warming. In tests, the material was still in fine form after 100 such cycles, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. "It performs beautifully," said Omar Yaghi, a reticular chemist at UC Berkeley and the study's senior author. "Based on the stability and the behavior of the material right now, we think it will go to thousands of cycles." Dubbed COF-999, the powder could be deployed in the kinds of large-scale direct air-capture plants that are starting to come online to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Advertisement Climate & Environment California's first carbon capture project gets OK from Kern County Kern County has signed off an oil company's plan to permanently store greenhouse gas emissions underground in a depleted oil field, marking California's first foray into carbon storage and a potential new role for oil and gas companies. Keeping the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide below 450 parts per million is necessary to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and prevent some of the most dire consequences of climate change, scientists say. Measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii indicate that CO 2 levels are currently around 423 ppm. "You have to take CO 2 from the air — there's no way around it," said Yaghi, who is also chief scientist at Berkeley's Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet. "Even if we stop emitting CO 2 , we still need to take it out of the air. We don't have any other options." Klaus Lackner, founding director of the Center for…