A simple, cheap material for carbon capture, perhaps from tailpipes

Carbon dioxide (depicted in red and white at left) is the main greenhouse gas warming Earth and is emitted in large quantities in the flue gas from industrial and power plants. A new method for removing CO2 from these flue gases involves piping the emissions through a porous material based on the chemical melamine (center). DETA, a chemical bound inside the porous melamine, grabs CO2 and removes it from the gas, with nitrogen vented to the atmosphere. Using an inexpensive polymer called melamine - the main component of Formica - chemists have created a cheap, easy and energy-efficient way to capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks, a key goal for the United States and other nations as they seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The process for synthesizing the melamine material, published this week in the journal Science Advances , could potentially be scaled down to capture emissions from vehicle exhaust or other movable sources of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning makes up about 75% of all greenhouse gases produced in the U.S. The new material is simple to make, requiring primarily off-the-shelf melamine powder - which today costs about $40 per ton - along with formaldehyde and cyanuric acid, a chemical that, among other uses, is added with chlorine to swimming pools. "We wanted to think about a carbon capture material that was derived from sources that were really cheap and easy to get.