A Stunning New Material May Shrink Humanity’s Carbon Footprint

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Humans produce roughly 35 billion tons of CO, and while the world can reliably soak up half that amount, it‘s clear the planet needs help to combat anthropogenic climate change.

A new solution from Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University is a porous material formed in a ‘cage of cages’ structure that can capture carbon dioxide and sulfur hexafluoride faster than trees.
Developing new materials while planting trees, lowering emissions, and pursuing various carbon capture technologies can help keep the world from undergoing catastrophic increases in temperature.

For millions of years, natural carbon sinks like terrestrial forests and ocean ecosystems have kept the Earth’s atmosphere in a happy balance—then humans came along and mucked everything up. Now, scientists are racing to find ways to clean up the anthropogenic mess we have created over the past two centuries and maintain a planet that’s habitable for future Homo sapiens.

The methods for fixing this problem are as varied as the climate threats we face. One idea is adding baking soda to concrete to help absorb carbon. Another is spreading ultra-fine concrete across agriculture fields to the same effect (while also improving crop yields). Some companies manufacture massive machinery designed to suck up carbon while others focus on creating 2D-structures that can trap greenhouse gasses before the escape from factories across the world.

Now, a new solution by Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University—in partnership with a variety of U.K. universities, as well as the China University of Science and Technology—has created a material that researchers described as a porous “cage of cages,” meticulously designed to capture both carbon dioxide and an even more potent greenhouse gas, sulfur hexafluoride. Using computer modeling to accurately predict how these molecules would form into this nesting doll of cages structure, the researchers created this material from oxygen, nitrogen, and fluorine to help sequester carbon faster than Earth’s natural, tree-based process. The paper was published last week in the journal Nature Synthesis.

“This is an exciting discovery because we need new porous materials to help solve society’s biggest challenges, such as capturing and storing greenhouse gasses,” Marc Little, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement. “Combining computational studies like ours with new AI technologies could create an unprecedented supply of new materials to solve the most pressing societal challenges, and this study is an important step in this direction.”

Using AI to find carbon capture solutions is a relatively nascent technique. Earlier this year, research from scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory revealed how an AI model could create 120,000 metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) in just 30 minutes. This identified good carbon absorbers from “billions and billions of possibilities,” according to the researchers.

Scientists at MIT estimate that humans produce roughly 35 billion tons of CO2 every year, and that the Earth soaks up about half of it. To help fight against climate change, we need to suck up the other half—and whether its planting trees, altering concrete, or created next-gen “cage of cages” materials, we need to do it quickly.

“Planting trees is a very effective way to absorb carbon, but it’s very slow,” Little said. “So we need a human intervention—like human-made molecules—to capture greenhouse gasses efficiently from the environment more quickly.”