Recent Developments in CO₂ Capture and Conversion

Abstract

S ince 2020, JACS Au has provided the chemical community a gold open access publishing platform covering all areas of research represented by the ACS Publications portfolio.As an ACS journal, we build upon three core elements common to all ACS Publications journals: speed of publishing and rigor of peer review, leading to substantial impact on the field.In doing so, we seek to cover a broad range of cutting-edge topics that span the breadth of modern research.Despite the breadth of our coverage, at any given time, there are certain topics of paramount importance that capture the attention of researchers across the world.Certainly, carbon dioxide capture, storage and conversion represents one of those timely topics.As it is a topic in which I am personally currently engaged, I have been pleased by the number, scope and quality of the submissions we have received in these areas at JACS Au.Consequently, we have published an array of interesting papers in our first 2.5 years of publication, and many of these papers are collected in our virtual issue that can be found here. Carbon Capture, Including Direct Air CaptureCarbon capture from point sources such as fossil fuel burning power plants, manufacturing facilities or other large point sources has been a topic of research for several decades.These technologies rely on the effective deployment of functional materials like membranes, adsorbents, solvents, etc. within efficient scalable processes.For rapid climate change mitigation, the captured CO 2 is often envisioned to be stored, geologically, for a time scale of centuries or longer.Ionic liquids are a long-standing class of materials used for CO 2 separation from mixed media.He, Zhang and co-workers (DOI: 10.1021/jacsau.1c00538)contributed a Perspective focusing on structure-property relationships in ionic liquids, with a focus on intramolecular hydrogen bonds, specifically Zbonds.They outline an array of future challenges that physical chemists are expected to tackle in the coming years associated with structure and bonding in ionic liquids in the context of Zbonds and quasi-liquids.An array of solid materials is currently being explored for CO 2 separation via adsorption, as well.The interactions of CO 2 with alkali as well as alkaline earth metal oxides and salts have been well-studied for decades and many CO 2 sorbents are constructed from these building blocks.In recent years, materials composed of metal salts loaded onto MgO have proven to be effective CO 2 sorbents operating at elevated temperatures (200-400 °C) where the alkali salt phase is molten.Muller and co-workers (

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