power plant

Drastically reducing the amount of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere is an essential goal in the effort to mitigate the effects of climate change.  While the ultimate solution is to avoid combustion of fossil fuels by the use of clean alternative energy sources, that transition will take time – possibly more time than we have.  As a result, there is a great deal of effort underway to develop techniques for capturing the carbon emitted by fossil fuel combustion and either recycling it or storing it.

There are multiple ways to capture carbon emissions, but the ultimate goal is to find a technique that is both inexpensive and scalable.  One promising technique involves the use of high-performance membranes, which are filters that can specifically pick out CO2 from a mix of gases, such as those coming out of a factory smokestack.

Scientists at a Swiss laboratory have now developed a new class of high-performance membranes that exceeds the targeted performance for carbon capture by a significant margin.  The membranes are based on single-layer graphene with a selective layer thinner than 20 nanometers – only about 40 atoms thick. The membranes are highly tunable in terms of chemistry, meaning that they can be designed to capture specific molecules.

The membranes are highly permeable – meaning that they don’t impede gas flow too much – but highly selective.  The CO2/N2 separation factor is 22.5, which means that 22.5 times more nitrogen can get through the membrane than carbon dioxide.

The work is just at the laboratory stage at this point, but it is a very promising step towards developing a practical scheme for keeping carbon dioxide from escaping from power-plant and factory smokestacks.

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Next-gen membranes for carbon capture

Photo, posted December 28, 2010, courtesy of Emilian Robert Vicol via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.