Moisture-swing direct air capture of CO2 and utilization

Capture CO2 from the Air to Solve Climate Change Issue: Climate change needs translational engineering solutions to address the excess CO2 that has already been dumped into the atmosphere. The urgency of CO2 capture from ambient air has been well established. However, the acceptance of such technologies of Direct Air Capture (DAC) of CO2 still needs to be improved due to the cost and technical difficulty of solving this problem. There are many benefits in CO2 elimination, including but not limited to: critical for mitigating the effects of global climate change, improving public health, maintaining animals and plant diversity, and many more. CO2 conversion to synthetic fuel is also one of the most critical goals on the United Nations’ sustainable development agenda.

Challenges in the Area of DAC:

●      CO2 concentration in the air is low and hard to capture.

●      The selectivity of existing materials for CO2 capture is low, meaning they will absorb a lot of other types of gas from the air.

●      The current material used to capture CO2 is not stable. Material needs high temperatures to regenerate, meaning increased energy consumption, which can be very costly for production.

Our company Arbon (www.arboncapture.com), has developed a reusable material to capture CO2 directly from the air in a dry condition and release CO2 when wet. Arbon’s core technology on moisture swing adsorption only uses water in the process.  Our sorbent has exhibited remarkable stability and does not degrade after 10,000 cycles. It has a high energy efficiency without consuming heat during regeneration, which is considered the most significant bottleneck for the high energy cost of traditional direct air capture technologies.

Arbon’s innovative sorbent technology can capture CO2 directly from the ambient air, building off ten years of laboratory breakthroughs led by our co-founder at Columbia University, as validated in peer-reviewed publications in top energy journals, such as Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2020 59 (18), 6984-7006; Angewandte Chemie 2016 128 (12), 4094-4097; and Joule 2020 4 (8), 1823-1837. These findings have been featured on the homepages of Columbia Engineering and Arizona State University. 

Arbon’s moisture swing CO2 sorbent exhibits disruptive, leading technology advantages:

1) high selectivity (it only captures CO2, not H2O from the air);

2) high stability (it can capture and run 10,000 cycles without degradation);

3) low energy cost (1/3 energy cost compared to traditional amine and 1/6 compared to strong alkaline. For example, the Ca-based calcination process and Na-based decomposition and hydrolysis process requires the heat of adsorption of 179 kJ/mol of CO2 and 135 kJ/mol of CO2, respectively. The average value of reported heat of sorption of amine-based sorbents was estimated at around 80 kJ/mol to 120 kJ/mol of CO2 based on the average value of reported heat of sorption of CO2 by amine solution. The heat of sorption of moisture swing has been reported with a low value of 32 kJ/mol of CO2 compared with other sorbents);

4) low cost (moisture swing CO2 sorbent only costs water but not heat; the design is simple; the material is stable; the cost can reduce significantly with the massive production of module devices);

5) Fast kinetics (per gram of the sorbent per hour can capture 0.54 mmol of CO2).

We directly capture CO2 from indoor and outdoor environments, and use the captured CO2 for cement curing.

●      Dr. Xiaoyang Shi – winner of the 2022 Corning Advanced Materials Prize. Dr. Xiaoyang Shi, currently a research scientist at Columbia University, serves as the Co-Founder & CEO. Dr. Shi holds a Ph.D. in Earth & Environmental Engineering from Columbia University. Dr. Shi has been studying direct air capture (DAC) technology for over a decade, and his work on moisture-swing-based DAC has appeared in a number of renowned energy publications.   

●      Dr. Xiangkun (Elvis) Cao – Dr. Xiangkun (Elvis) Cao, currently a Schmidt Science Fellow & Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, is the Co-Founder & CTO. Dr. Cao holds a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University. Dr. Cao has extensive experience in CO2 utilization and landed on Forbes 30 Under 30 in Energy for his work converting CO2 emissions into fuels and feedstocks.

●      Dr. Klaus Lackner – Dr. Klaus Lackner, currently a full professor and Director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University, serves as the technical advisor for Arbon. Dr. Lackner is widely considered the father of Direct Air Capture of CO2.

Arbon’s innovative sorbent technology can capture CO2 directly from the ambient air, building off ten years of laboratory breakthroughs led by our co-founder at Columbia University, as validated in peer-reviewed publications in top energy journals, such as Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2020 59 (18), 6984-7006; Angewandte Chemie 2016 128 (12), 4094-4097; and Joule 2020 4 (8), 1823-1837. These findings have been featured on the homepages of Columbia Engineering and Arizona State University.

Our co-founder, Dr. Xiaoyang Shi, won Corning Advanced Materials Prize in 2022 based on the new technology of oxide materials (https://labtomarket.columbia.edu/news/dr-xiaoyang-shi-wins-2022-columbia-corning-advanced-materials-prize-50000), which has aroused interests of many Venture Capitals.

We are currently operating at gram CO2 per day scale, and we have recently secured funding to upscale our production to 3 tons CO2 per day scale by Q3 of 2024.

We hope to forge connections through the MIT Solve network, which is critical for our upscaling process to make a greater impact.