Abstract
Carbon capture and storage is an important strategy for stabilizing the increasing concentration of atmospheric CO2 and the global temperature. A possible approach toward reversing this trend and decreasing the atmospheric CO2 concentration is to remove the CO2 directly from air (direct air capture). Herein we report a simple aqueous guanidine sorbent that captures CO2 from ambient air and binds it as a crystalline carbonate salt by guanidinium hydrogen bonding. The resulting solid has very low aqueous solubility (Ksp=1.0(4)×10−8), which facilitates its separation from solution by filtration. The bound CO2 can be released by relatively mild heating of the crystals at 80–120 °C, which regenerates the guanidine sorbent quantitatively. Thus, this crystallization-based approach to CO2 separation from air requires minimal energy and chemical input, and offers the prospect for low-cost direct air capture technologies.
