ExxonMobil collaborates to find new materials to develop carbon capture technology

Laboratory studies on 24 July 2020 suggest the patent-pending products, known as tetraamine-functionalized organic metal structures, trap carbon dioxide emissions up to six times more effectively than traditional amine-based carbon capture techniques. The material has the ability to reduce the cost of the product by using less resources to capture and remove carbon and potentially help commercial applications.

Through manipulating the structure of the metal organic frame material, the team of scientists and students demonstrated the ability to condense a surface area of the size of a football field into one gram of mass – around the same as a paper clip – which acts as a CO2 sponge. Results from the study were published today in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Science.

“This advanced hybrid porous material has proven to be more robust, needs less heating and cooling, and captures more CO2 than current materials, "said Vijay Swarup, R&D Vice President at ExxonMobil Science and Engineering Company.

“We are building a range of lower-emission energy solutions through partnerships with major academic institutions and national labs such as UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This provides yet another example of one of ExxonMobil's many new materials being researched to reduce CO2 in energy production, "said Swarup.

The team of ExxonMobil, led by Senior Research Associate Simon Weston, together with UC Berkeley's professor Jeffrey Long and his faculty and students have been working together for eight years to create this new carbon capture solution that demonstrates stability in the presence of water vapor, without oxidation, enabling carbon dioxide to be collected from a variety of sources, under a number of conditions.

More research and development would be required to advance this technology to a greater pilot scale and eventually to industrial scale.

Research has shown successfully that these hybrid porous metal-organic materials are highly efficient, absorbing more than 90% of the CO2 released from industrial sources. The materials have much greater ability to absorb carbon dioxide and can be regenerated by using low-temperature steam for repeated use, requiring less energy for the overall carbon capture cycle.

“This groundbreaking development in carbon capture technology is a prime example of how scientists with diverse backgrounds from universities, national laboratories and industry can work together to tackle fundamental research challenges, "said Jeffrey Long, professor of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California , Berkeley and senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley N. "We are fortunate that ExxonMobil had such long-term funding for science, without which this finding would not have been possible. I hope this success helps to promote further collaborations between industry and academic research laboratories.”

ExxonMobil is the global leader in carbon capture, trapping more carbon dioxide than any other organization since 1970 and collaborating collaboratively with others on a variety of carbon capture technologies. Since 2000, ExxonMobil has spent around $10 billion in ventures aimed at studying, designing and implementing energy solutions with lower emissions. The organization aims to broaden its joint efforts to develop next-generation energy technologies with more than 80 universities, five energy centers and various private sector partners around the world.

Scientific researchers include Simon Weston and Joseph Falkowski of ExxonMobil; Eugene Kim, Henry Jiang, Alexander Forse, Jeffrey Martell, Phillip Milner of the University of California , Berkeley; and Rebecca Siegelman, Jung-Hoon Lee, Jeffrey Neaton, Jeffrey Reimer, Jeffrey Long of the National Laboratory of the University of California , Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley.