Exhaust from coal-fired power plants, at left, contains large quantities of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (purple tripartite molecules). Aluminum formate, a metal-organic framework whose structure is highlighted at right, can selectively capture carbon dioxide from dried flue gas conditions, potentially at a fraction of the cost of using other carbon filtration materials.
Credit: B. Hayes/NIST
How can we remove carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from fossil-fuel power plant exhaust before it ever reaches the atmosphere? New findings suggest a promising answer lies in a simple, economical and potentially reusable material analyzed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where scientists from several institutions have determined why this material works as well as it does.
The team’s object of study is aluminum formate, one of a class of substances called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). As a group, MOFs have exhibited great potential for filtering and separating organic materials — often the various hydrocarbons in fossil fuels — from one another. Some MOFs have shown promise at refining natural gas or separating the octane components of gasoline; others might contribute to reducing the cost of plastics manufacturing or cheaply converting one substance to another. Their capacity to perform such separations comes from their inherently porous nature.
Aluminum formate, which the scientists refer to ..
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