Scientists have developed a new type of self-assembling silver membrane that could be used to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions before they have a chance to spread in the atmosphere.
Using a technique the team says has never been attempted before, the researchers seeded their gas separation membrane with only a tiny deposit of the valuable metal, leveraging the flow of CO2 itself to grow tiny silver crystals, or dendrites, on the membrane.
These dendrites would then dramatically increase the efficiency of the structure, allowing for large amounts of CO2 and oxygen to flow through without having to use as much of the precious metal as in previous methods.
"We didn't build the entire membrane from silver," explained carbon capture engineer Greg Mutch from Newcastle University in the UK.
"Instead, we added a small amount of silver and grew it within the membrane, adding the functionality we desired."
The process is an example of what's called carbon capture and storage (CCS), a vast range of approaches for filtering CO2 emissions, with the aim of preventing them from flowing into the atmosphere and contributing to anthropogenic global warming.
A diverse number of industrial CCS projects have been implemented around the world, some going back decades. But the field is still evolving, with advancements in the science and economics of carbon capture being made all the time.
One big restriction holding back the roll-out of some of the most promising-looking hypothetical CCS ideas is cost. While scientists have limitless brilliant ideas that they can successfully realize in the laboratory, figuring out how to practically and cost-effectively scale up such methods to industrial-size executions is another thing.