A team at the University of Toronto has cracked something the carbon capture industry has struggled with for years: making the technology cheap enough to actually scale.
They've designed a method called evaporative carbonate crystallization that works like this: wind blows across thin polypropylene fibers dipped in potassium hydroxide solution. As the liquid evaporates up the fiber, it becomes so concentrated that carbon dioxide reacts with it at speeds far faster than current systems allow. The captured carbon then crystallizes into solid potassium carbonate—the researchers call it "rock candy"—right on the fiber's surface.
"We've had the technology to capture CO2 for decades," says Professor David Sinton, who led the work. "There are even full-scale plants running. But they're expensive. So we built this around radical cost reductions."
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Start Your News DetoxHere's why the solid crystal matters. Today's carbon capture plants dissolve CO2 into liquid, then need massive chemical facilities to separate it back out again. That's expensive infrastructure. With this method, you just wash off the crystals with water. Done. No complex separation plant needed.
The captured CO2 can then be converted into pure gas through an electrochemical process—and that regenerates the capture liquid so you can use it again. From there, the CO2 goes to storage, underground sequestration, or gets converted into useful products like methanol and ethylene.
The numbers are compelling. Capital costs—the upfront money to build the system—could drop by up to 40% compared to existing plants. Operating costs stay roughly the same, but when you're talking about industrial-scale infrastructure, eliminating the massive air contactors and chemical regeneration plants is significant savings.
"If you walk through an industrial carbon capture plant, the two biggest things you see are the air contactor with all its fans and blowers, and the chemical plant," Sinton explains. "If you can eliminate both of those, you save a lot of money."
The method works better in drier air, which is a constraint worth noting. But the research, published in Nature Chemical Engineering, shows this approach is viable at scale. The question now isn't whether it works—it's how quickly the industry moves to adopt it.
