{"id":"doi:10.1038/s41560-025-01714-y","kind":"article","title":"Direct air capture of CO2 for solar fuel production in flow","authors":["Sayan Kar","Dong‐Seok Kim","Ariffin Bin Mohamad Annuar","Bidyut Bikash Sarma","Michael Stanton","Erwin Lam","Subhajit Bhattacharjee","Suvendu Karak","Heather F. Greer","Erwin Reisner"],"author_count":10,"year":2025,"published":"2025-02-13","venue":"Nature Energy","cited_by":126,"doi":"10.1038/s41560-025-01714-y","arxiv_id":null,"nct_id":null,"source_url":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-025-01714-y","archive_url":"https://space-kitty.com/papers/doi:10.1038/s41560-025-01714-y","updated":null,"pmid":"40291483","pmcid":null,"openalex_id":"W4407549870","pdf_url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-025-01714-y.pdf","abstract":"Abstract Direct air capture is an emerging technology to decrease atmospheric CO 2 levels, but it is currently costly and the long-term consequences of CO 2 storage are uncertain. An alternative approach is to utilize atmospheric CO 2 on-site to produce value-added renewable fuels, but current CO 2 utilization technologies predominantly require a concentrated CO 2 feed or high temperature. Here we report a gas-phase dual-bed direct air carbon capture and utilization flow reactor that produces syngas (CO + H 2 ) through on-site utilization of air-captured CO 2 using light without requiring high temperature or pressure. The reactor consists of a bed of solid silica-amine adsorbent to capture aerobic CO 2 and produce CO 2 -free air; concentrated light is used to release the captured CO 2 and convert it to syngas over a bed of a silica/alumina-titania-cobalt bis(terpyridine) molecular–semiconductor photocatalyst. We use the oxidation of depolymerized poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastics as the counter-reaction. We envision this technology to operate in a diurnal fashion where CO 2 is captured during night-time and converted to syngas under concentrated sunlight during the day.","abstract_license":"CC-BY (publisher license, via OpenAlex)","license":"cc-by","is_open_access":true,"peer_reviewed":null,"categories":["Carbon Dioxide Capture Technologies"],"details":null,"provenance":"openalex","attribution":"Abstract of \"Direct air capture of CO2 for solar fuel production in flow\" by Sayan Kar, Dong‐Seok Kim, Ariffin Bin Mohamad Annuar et al., https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-025-01714-y, used under its Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY); markup removed, otherwise unmodified.","topics":[{"slug":"carbon-removal","name":"Carbon Dioxide Removal","domain_slug":"energy"}],"cited_in_dossiers":[]}