One Material, Two Jobs: Dual-Function DAC Skips the Energy-Hungry Regeneration Step
DAC’s dirty secret isn’t the fans or the contactors — it’s the regeneration step. Heating sorbents to 900°C (for solid sorbents) or boiling caustic solutions (for liquid systems) to release captured CO₂ consumes enormous amounts of energy. It’s the single biggest reason DAC costs $400–600/ton today. What if you could just… skip it? A new paper in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering proposes exactly that. Researchers developed FeNi-modified CaZr dual-functional materials (DFMs) that capture CO₂ directly from ambient air and convert it into useful products via the reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) reaction — in the same reactor, on the same material, in a single integrated process. ...