Scialog Collaborators Receive Funding to Continue Marine CO2 Removal Research
A Scialog: Negative Emissions Science team whose 2021 collaborative project for a novel membrane to pair direct ocean capture of CO2 with desalination has been awarded a $1.4M Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Award from the Office of Naval Research through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Oceanographic Partnership Program.
Katherine Hornbostel, University of Pittsburgh, will be PI of the two-year project, along with her Scialog collaborators Matthew Green, Arizona State University, and Jennifer Yang, University of California, Irvine. Also involved in the project, Coupling Desalination with Novel mCDR Membranes, are Mou Paul and Abhishek Roy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Hornbostel, Green and Yang remember having their first conversations together as they were matched up in an online breakout session at the virtual meeting of Scialog: Negative Emissions Science in 2021.
“Basically, we proposed to develop a technology called a membrane that can simultaneously perform desalination (extracting clean drinking water from seawater) and capture CO2 from seawater,” Hornbostel said. “This makes a lot of sense to pursue because those two technologies have a lot in common, so we could save a lot of money, space, etc., by combining them into a single hybrid system.”
Yang is a chemist, Green is a chemical engineer, and Hornbostel is a mechanical engineer. In their partnership, Yang’s lab synthesizes chemical groups that Green’s team then attaches to membranes. Hornbostel’s group performs simulations and calculations to predict how the membranes would perform at a larger scale.
“The seed funding enabled us to start trying things out experimentally and seeing what worked and what didn't work,” Hornbostel said. “It gave us the preliminary results necessary to procure follow-on external funding.”
Green said their new collaborators Paul and Roy have a wealth of experience in membrane separations for desalination and carbon capture, adding new expertise to the expanding project. “Now, not only does the team have the capability to develop a brand-new concept, but we also have the know-how to scale up and can leverage recent investments at NREL for roll-to-roll membrane processing.”
The three Scialog awardees are amazed and delighted at how well their project took off after having to be done virtually for a long time during the pandemic.
“We have great chemistry, pun intended,” Hornbostel said.
Yang added: “I am very excited to work with this team! We have very different expertise but communicate well across our disciplines.”
The project’s proposed design could be a game-changer for direct ocean capture of CO2 from seawater because the chemical surface coatings on the membranes show promise of being able to release a lot more captured CO2 for sequestration or other use than previous methods. In addition, combining ocean capture with desalination could accelerate the development and deployment of new technology by leveraging existing desalination infrastructure.
The fourth and final meeting of Scialog: Negative Emissions Science, sponsored by RCSA and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will be held November 15-18, 2023, in Tucson.
