An innocuous yellow powder, created in a lab, could be a new way to combat the climate crisis by absorbing carbon from the air.
Yaghi has been working on similar materials for decades. It’s part of a broader push to collect tiny amounts of carbon from the air – either from power plants or from air around cities. Yaghi’s research with Zihui Zhou, a graduate student in his lab, and others was published in the journal Yaghi says he could imagine a future in which people build large plants using the material in every city of 1 million people or more around the world. He has plans to scale the use of this type of carbon capture with his Irvine, California-based company, Atoco, and believes the powder can be manufactured in multi-ton quantities in less than a year.