Carbon Capture Engineering

Carbon capture engineering encompasses a suite of technologies and processes designed to isolate carbon dioxide from gas streams and to concentrate, transport and store or utilise it in a controlled manner. Approaches span post-combustion capture from flue gases via chemical solvents or solid sorbents, pre-combustion routes in which fuels are first converted to syngas and then decarbonised, and oxy-fuel combustion that produces a CO₂-rich exhaust. Advanced materials such as amine-functionalised polymers, metal–organic frameworks, hydrophobic deep eutectic solvents and redox-active oxides are tailored to maximise selective CO₂ uptake while minimising energy penalties for regeneration. Process configurations range from pressure- or temperature-swing adsorption cycles to electrochemical pH- or potential-swing systems that capture and release CO₂ on demand. Integrated design must balance capture efficiency, material stability, process intensification and system economics, while conforming to safety, regulatory and environmental constraints. Deployments at commercial scale require judicious integration with power plants, industrial facilities and pipeline networks, as well as lifecycle assessments to ensure net climate benefits. Ongoing engineering challenges include reducing energy consumption for solvent or sorbent regeneration, maintaining performance under real-world impurity profiles, and scaling up promising materials and reactor designs for gigatonne-scale CO₂ removal.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent investigations have illuminated the microscopic interactions that govern solvent performance in designer liquid media. Molecular dynamics simulations of a choline chloride–phenyl propionic acid deep eutectic solvent (DES) have quantified how hydrogen-bond networks, self-diffusion coefficients and non-bonding interaction energies evolve with temperature, offering a validated computational framework to screen DES candidates for CO₂ solubility and transport properties. Complementing this, quantitative structure–property relationship models have been developed for choline chloride-based DESs, correlating molecular descriptors of hydrogen bond donors with experimentally measured CO₂ uptake across varying temperatures and compositions. These predictive models provide rapid in silico guidance for selecting DES formulations that combine high solubility, low viscosity and facile regeneration, thereby accelerating solvent design for carbon capture.

Research from all publishers

Hydrophobic DESs derived from naturally sourced acids and alcohols have been tailored for pre-combustion CO₂ capture using conductor-like screening models. A series of novel formulations exhibited solvent densities above 1.0 g mL⁻¹, thermal stabilities up to 420 K and CO₂ uptake and viscosity metrics comparable with industrial benchmarks, pointing to their compatibility with high-pressure syngas streams. In parallel, high-throughput computational and experimental campaigns have identified perovskite-structured, redox-activated CO₂ sorbents that perform isothermal carbonation and regeneration. By tuning lattice compositions via density functional theory descriptors, these materials enable up to 78 % reversible uptake of multivalent cations, facilitating sorption-enhanced reforming of biomass and biogas to produce hydrogen-enriched syngas under practical reactor conditions.

Carbon Capture Engineering publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in carbon capture engineering across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Deep eutectic solvent (DES): A eutectic mixture of hydrogen-bond donor and acceptor components that forms a low-melting, low-volatility liquid tailored for gas absorption.

Sorbent: A solid or liquid material engineered to selectively capture CO₂ from a gas stream through physisorption or chemisorption.

Redox-activated sorbent: A material whose CO₂ binding affinity can be modulated isothermally via changes in its oxidation state upon charging or discharging.

Perovskite: A crystalline oxide structure with general formula ABX₃ whose composition can be varied to tailor redox and sorption properties for carbon capture.

Temperature-swing adsorption (TSA): A cyclic capture process in which CO₂-loaded sorbents are regenerated by heating to release the gas and then cooled to resume uptake.

References

1. Insights into the interactions and dynamics of a DES formed by phenyl propionic acid and choline chloride. Scientific Reports (2021).
2. New molecular structure based models for estimation of the CO2 solubility in different choline chloride-based deep eutectic solvents (DESs). Scientific Reports (2023).
3. Development of Natural Hydrophobic Deep Eutectic Solvents for Precombustion CO2 Capture. ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering (2022).
4. High-throughput design of complex oxides as isothermal, redox-activated CO 2 sorbents for green hydrogen generation. Energy & Environmental Science (2024).