On a recent visit to a UC Berkeley lab, scientists sprinkled a newly developed yellow powder onto the counter for me to touch. Feeling the coarse crystals between my fingers was a surreal experience — I was holding a transformative weapon against an existential threat to humanity in my hands.
Known as COF-999, the powder functions as a magnet that grabs and traps carbon dioxide from open air, even when the gas is present in small concentrations. The carbon dioxide can then be extracted from the material and pumped deep underground into porous rocks, sequestering it away from the atmosphere.
“I see the solution to the climate problem right there, in our hands,” said UC Berkeley chemist Omar Yaghi, the study’s senior author. If true, COF-999 will join the ranks of giant scientific breakthroughs that have come out of Berkeley, including CRISPR gene editing in 2012.
Yaghi and his coauthors published a study in the scientific journal “Nature” on Oct. 23 announcing their discovery of an “exceptional material” — a powder that builds on Yaghi’s foundational research and is poised to play a major role in fighting climate change by quite literally sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.
“This is really a breakthrough,” said University of Chicago chemist Laura Gagliardi, a coauthor on the paper. “We can now think about capturing all the carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere in a finite number of years.” The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is now 50% higher than before the Industrial Revolution because of the increased burning of fossil fuels.
The road to developing COF-999 was full of trial and error. Zihui Zhou, a fourth-year PhD student in chemistry at UC Berkeley in Yaghi’s lab, conducted hundreds of experiments that involved precisely engineering molecules like Lego blocks. Day after day, on the sixth floor of UC Berkeley’s chemistry building, Zhou synthesized strong bonds between different molecules, trying to find a material to capture carbon dioxide from the air.
Three years later, Zhou’s lab drawer is full of tiny tubes with varying shades of yellow powders, each representing an experiment that didn’t work. The drawer is a window into Zhou’s meticulous scientific method, each tube labeled in thin black marker with miniature drawings of chemical structures.
On the day Zhou tested COF-999 under real-life conditions, the air in Berkeley had around 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Scientists say that keeping atmospheric carbon dioxide below 450 parts per million is necessary for limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Global average atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at 419.3 parts per million in 2023, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Zhou passed Berkeley’s air through the yellow powder, and voilà! There was no carbon dioxide on the other side.
“We knew right then that we have a material to solve the carbon capture problem,” Yaghi said.
Yaghi, 59, is known for pioneering reticular chemistry — the process of linking molecular building blocks with strong bonds to create crystalline frameworks. His work has made him one of the most-cited chemists in the world. Yaghi spent the 2010s developing and commercializing molecules that harvest drinking water from air. Now he has plans to scale carbon capture with his Irvine-based company, Atoco, and believes the powder can be manufactured in multiton quantities in less than a year.
Early results of the powder’s effectiveness have found that a half-pound of the material can remove as much carbon dioxide from the air as a tree. But while trees mainly absorb carbon dioxide during daylight hours, the powder will be used in direct-air capture plants (large fans that suck in carbon dioxide) working around the clock.
Materials currently being used for carbon capture quickly decompose and require copious amounts of energy to function, Yaghi explained. This powder requires no energy, shows no signs of degradation even after 100 uses, and is made from inexpensive, commercially available materials.
“The phone has been ringing off the hook” with calls from investors, Yaghi said. “It’s a very, very exciting time.”
As the lead author of this study at just 25, Zhou has achieved his first substantial scientific milestone, and its practical applications make it even more significant to him.
“It’s on our generation to solve the problem of global warming,” he said.
These scientists aren’t stopping at this breakthrough. Yaghi says the next step is to use AI and machine learning to design structures that take up double the carbon dioxide of COF-999. With these materials, he says, the hope is to be able to drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and reduce the effects of global warming, such as severe storms, drought, and wildfires.
“I am thrilled,” Yaghi said. “Science that doesn’t reach society isn’t worth doing.”