Allen B. Wright

The urgency of the development of CO2 capture from ambient air

CO2 capture and storage (CCS) has the potential to develop into an important tool to address climate change. Given society’s present reliance on fossil fuels, widespread adoption of CCS appears indispensable for meeting stringent climate targets. We argue that for conventional CCS to become a successful climate mitigation technology—which by necessity has to operate on a large scale—it may need to be complemented with air capture, removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere. Air capture of CO2 could act as insurance against CO2 leaking from storage and furthermore may provide an option for dealing with emissions from mobile dispersed sources such as automobiles and airplanes.

Moisture swing sorbent for carbon dioxide capture from ambient air.

An amine-based anion exchange resin dispersed in a flat sheet of polypropylene was prepared in alkaline forms so that it would capture carbon dioxide from air. The resin, with quaternary ammonium cations attached to the polymer structure and hydroxide or carbonate groups as mobile counterions, absorbs carbon dioxide when dry and releases it when wet. In ambient air, the moist resin dries spontaneously and subsequently absorbs carbon dioxide. This constitutes a moisture induced cycle, which stands in contrast to thermal pressure swing based cycles. This paper aims to determine the isothermal performance of the sorbent during such a moisture swing. Equilibrium experiments show that the absorption and desorption process can be described well by a Langmuir isothermal model. The equilibrium partial pressure of carbon dioxide over the resin at a given loading state can be increased by 2 orders of magnitude by wetting the resin.

Moisture-swing sorption for carbon dioxide capture from ambient air: a thermodynamic analysis

An ideal chemical sorbent for carbon dioxide capture from ambient air (air capture) must have a number of favourable properties, such as environmentally benign behaviour, a high affinity for CO(2) at very low concentration (400 ppm), and a low energy cost for regeneration. The last two properties seem contradictory, especially for sorbents employing thermal swing adsorption. On the other hand, thermodynamic analysis shows that the energy cost of an air capture device need only be slightly larger than that of a flue gas scrubber. The moisture swing separation process studied in this paper provides a novel approach to low cost CO(2) capture from air. The anionic exchange resin sorbent binds CO(2) when dry and releases it when wet. A thermodynamic model with coupled phase and chemical equilibria is developed to study the complex H(2)O-CO(2)-resin system. The moisture swing behaviour is compatible with hydration energies changing with the activity of water on the resin surfaces. This activity is in turn set by the humidity. The rearrangement of hydration water on the resin upon the sorption of a CO(2) molecule is predicted as a function of the humidity and temperature. Using water as fuel to drive the moisture swing enables an economical, large-scale implementation of air capture. By generating CO(2) with low partial pressures, the present technology has implications for in situ CO(2) utilizations which require low pressure CO(2) gas rather than liquid CO(2).

Factors influencing 7Be accumulation on rock varnish

Rocks coated with desert varnish were translocated from Scottsdale, Arizona, and Panamint Valley, California, to a fenced-in plot near Biosphere 2 where they were allowed to accumulate a new crop of the 53 day half life, cosmic ray-produced 7Be. Those exposed to precipitation accumulated several times more of this isotope than those shielded from precipitation. No significant difference in 7Be accumulation was observed between a set which was UV irradiated (in an attempt to kill resident bacteria) and a set which received no UV irradiation. This experiment suggests that 62 ± 10 percent of the beryllium accumulated on the varnish was supplied by precipitation and 38 ± 10 percent by some combination of dew, dust, and aerosols. If bacteria are, as has been proposed, responsible for varnish growth, then either our UV irradiation was inadequate to squelch their activity or the 7Be we measured had not yet been built into the varnish.