Tang Prize winner urges Taiwan to mass produce novel CO2 capture tech

Taipei, Oct. 1 (CNA) Winner of the Tang Prize in Sustainable Development Omar M. Yaghi on Tuesday encouraged Taiwan to produce advanced materials capable of capturing carbon dioxide and harvesting water.

Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, put forward the proposal at a Tang Prize Masters' Forum at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan's northern city of Hsinchu.

At the forum, the prize-winning chemist explained the advantages of a covalent organic framework (COF) developed by himself and one of his students that has the ability to capture CO2 from air.

"I would say the scientific challenge of capturing CO2 from air is solved," Yaghi told the forum. "What remains is for Taiwanese to scale up this material."

According to Yaghi, the COF developed in his lab is composed of carbon-carbon and carbon-nitrogen bonds -- some of the strongest bonds in chemistry -- making it more stable and energy-efficient than current carbon capture techniques that utilize amine solutions while also being more durable than those employing solids.

The COF can capture 1 millimole (mmol) of CO2 per gram with a lifespan of at least 100,000 cycles, meeting the minimum requirements for the material to be commercially viable, the Jordanian-born chemist said.

It works "even better" in facilities capturing flue gas, said Yaghi, who was awarded the Tang Prize in Sustainable Development at a ceremony in Taipei on Sept. 27.

Polymers developed by his team known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are already being used in industries to capture CO2, Yaghi noted.

However, he hopes COFs will also gain traction in the market and described Taiwan as "the only country that has the boldness to scale up and manufacture the COF."

As moderator of the panel discussion, Albert Yeung (楊德忠), director of the Institute of Environmental Engineering at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, asked Yaghi what Taiwan's advantage would be if it were to commercially produce COFs.

Yaghi responded by saying that Taiwan has a "very strong skilled workforce" that is able to take all the "necessary steps" from design to manufacture stages.

Taiwan has the necessary workforce and companies who "work fast and have done it before," Yaghi added.

Yaghi said that one type of MOF which his team experimented with in Death Valley, a desert in California, successfully used a sunlight-powered device the size of a small refrigerator to capture 22 liters of water from the air per day.

In Taiwan's much more humid conditions, one ton of MOF would be able to produce 3,000 tons of clean water per day using only ambient sunlight, and when powered with electricity could potentially supply up to 600,000 liters of water per day, Yaghi said.

"So I think this is now ready to be handed over to somebody in Taiwan to manufacture, to modify and make it, make it more robust as a device," he added.

Lee Tzong-ming (李宗銘), senior vice president at the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan, said during the panel discussion that Taiwan possesses the technical capacity to produce MOFs if given the opportunity to collaborate with Yaghi.

For example, Lee said, Taiwan's two largest oil and gas companies, Formosa Petrochemical Corp. and CPC Corp., both have the necessary research and engineering capabilities.

The technology also has good prospects at power plants and in other sectors where flue gas is produced in large quantities, he added.

The Tang Prize is a biennial award established in 2012 by Taiwanese entrepreneur Samuel Yin (尹衍樑), chairman of the Ruentex Group, to honor those who have made significant contributions in four categories -- sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, sinology and the rule of law.