Developing innovative alternatives to conventional carbon capture methods

Carbon capture is an important climate change mitigation strategy, but it faces technological barriers and can be energy-intensive and expensive. To help make necessary advances in this area, a team of MIT researchers, with support from the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), are exploring energy-efficient and scalable alternatives to conventional carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture methods. 

Conventional amine scrubbing, which is the current standard for CO₂ capture, is energy-intensive and difficult to scale, limiting its impact despite the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions and upgrade CO₂ into valuable products. In a new article published in Nature Energy, MIT researchers — graduate students Fang-Yu Kuo of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Gi Hyun Byun of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE); Professor Betar Gallant of MechE; and former MCSC postdoctoral Impact Fellows Glen Junor and Akachukwu Obi — investigate a promising alternative to these conventional CO₂ capture methods. Their findings could move the needle on achieving efficient and flexible carbon capture and removal.

In their paper, the team explores an alternative, electrochemically mediated CO₂ capture (EMCC). This approach enables electrification of CO₂ separation — driven ideally by renewables — but currently faces challenges, such as relying on sorbents that require highly reducing potentials, where oxygen reduction side reactions become significant. This can compromise both efficiency and long-term performance. To tackle this shortcoming of EMCC, the MIT team researched whether N-heterocyclic imines (NHIs) is a useful new class of EMCC sorbent.

“NHIs have shown promise in recent years as CO₂ sorbents because of the ease of NHI molecular modifications for tuning basicity,” says Fang-Yu Kuo. “Our work translates these NHIs for the first time into the EMCC application space, and demonstrates that NHI-based sorbents can be modulated electrochemically for CO₂ separation by a unique separation mechanism that avoids the need of applying highly reducing potentials.”

The team’s initial research establishes a novel bis(NHI) structure that can enable a theoretical CO₂ modulation of two molecules per electron during cell operation. The initial published result also indicates that with further molecular engineering of bis(NHI) structures to strengthen CO₂ binding affinity, the bis(NHI) could operate in more diverse electrolyte environments, opening new possibilities to optimize system performance in terms of electron efficiency, energy efficiency, and operational flexibility.

“A critical future direction of our work involves gaining deeper mechanistic insight into the stability and degradation pathways of the bis(NHI) radical cation,” says Kuo. “Understanding these pathways will inform the rational design of next-generation bis(NHI) molecules, enabling longer operational lifetimes and enhanced cycling durability for practical deployment.”