Carbon-Trapping 'Sponges' May Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions

In the fight against climate change and an increasingly warming world, scientists may have just got a helping hand. A new material that acts as a carbon-trapping "sponge" may cut the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and solve our ongoing emissions problem, recent research says.

Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation, are particularly blamed for man-made climate change. Carbon capture, which involves trapping CO2 before it's released into the atmosphere, may curb the amount of the heat-trapping gas that goes into the atmosphere and warms our planet.

Standard methods of trying to capture carbon boast problems like toxicity, corrosiveness and inefficiency, but the new design by researchers at Cornell University gets around these issues.

The team, led by Professor Emmanuel Giannelis, developed a powder that performs better, and is safer than amine scrubbing, the most common carbon capture method used in natural gas and coal-burning plants. This conventional approach involves passing the post combustion flue gas through liquid vats of amino compounds (amines) where the carbon dioxide is absorbed. However, this amine solution is corrosive and expensive to contain.

But since 2008, after several trials, Cornell researchers have honed their novel technique.