A recent IPCC report has highlighted the importance and urgency for carbon capture: The atmospheric CO2 levels have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. As a result, there is increasing desire for climate change mitigation, also driven by the need to comply with international legislation. Despite wide research efforts, there are significant challenges facing CCS technologies e.g. carbon capture by absorption will require radically new chemistries, working capacities of solid adsorbents are typically poor and CO2 utilisation through mineralisation are not practical due to at high operating temperatures, slow rates and low conversions. It is hence clear that extensive future research in novel materials for carbon capture is urgently required into environmentally friendly materials/processes with better performance. We have prepared bioinspired "green" nanosilicas (prepared via aqueous one-step, rapid and pH neutral methods) with embedded amine or enzyme functionalities to allow CO2 separation and mineralisation respectively. GN exhibit high amine efficiency as high as 0.31 nCO2/nN (vs. ~0.23-0.3 nCO2/nN for reported materials), with rapid and stable adsorption-desorption performance over 60+ cycles. For enzymatic sequestration, carbonic anhydrase immobilised on GN was found to be stable even at the enzyme thermal/chemical denaturation conditions (e.g. acidic/basic pH and 600C). Owing to their green process, GN can be manufactured continuously and when scaled-up to industrial capacities, they can be manufactured at ~$2/kg (significantly lower than $10/kg set for making CCS economically feasible), thus GN provide a significant cost benefit over most other CCS materials. See www.svplab.com for further details.

Bioinspired green nanomaterials (GN) design and manufacture for post-combustion carbon capture and sequestration

249th National Meeting (2015)

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