With advocates of “cleanish coal” bummed out about the government’s decision to pull the plug on the FutureGen coal with carbon capture and sequestration facility, we thought you might need some more positive news about sequestering gases. It comes courtesy of University of Calgary chemistry professor George Shimizu, and his team’s new “nanovalves”.
The researchers have developed a material that can mechanically trap gas at high densities without using high pressure, which often times has safety concerns. According to Shimizu “this is a proof of concept that represents an entirely new way of storing gas.”
Shimizu’s group had been primarily studying the use of the material for fuel cells, with only a secondary focus on gas storage with compression. But fellow University of Calgary professor and a co-author of the paper, David Cramb, believes that their latest nanovalve material could provide a boost (and we would hope, a price cut) for carbon capture.
Cramb wrote:
“These materials could help push forward the development of hydrogen fuel cells and the creation of filters to catch and store gases like CO2 or hydrogen sulfide from industrial operations in Alberta.”
How does it work exactly? The team takes advantage of the crystalline structure of barium organotrisulfonate. Through dehydrating and rehydrating the material, he can toggle its gas permeability back and forth. Insert the gas, heat it up, and it’s sealed inside. If you want to release the gas, you simply add water and the gas comes bubbling out. Shimizu’s method is described in the early online addition of Nature Materials.
Shimizu’s gas storage material is another promising commercial candidate from the class of substances known as metal-organic frameworks. They’re not exactly new, as this 2003 FuturePundit post writes about MOFs capability to store hydrogen highlights, but they are being put to a variety of new uses.
A prominent professor in the field is UCLA’s Omar Yaghi, who published the landmark paper in Nature back in 2003, and whose work continues at the leading edge of using metal-organic frameworks to store gases.
For now Shimizu and Cramb do not appear to have made any attempts at commercializing the new material — yet. But a simple, low cost way to sequester and store gases that we don’t want ending up in the atmosphere, could surely capture a lot of money.
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