Researchers at Oregon State University have developed BVR-X, a carbon capture material that removes CO2 from industrial exhaust even in humid conditions. Water usually blocks the pores in capture materials, but BVR-X separates water and CO2 into different parts of its structure. In lab tests, it captured CO2 from a gas mix with 4% CO2 at high humidity, similar to natural gas combustion exhaust, and kept working through dozens of capture and release cycles. The work is still at the research stage. The team filed a patent application and published results in Angewandte Chemie. Funding came from Saudi Aramco, the Murdock Charitable Trust, and an OSU donor fund. The open questions are real flue gas performance, regeneration energy, and whether the material can scale beyond the lab. If those hold up, avoiding the cost of drying exhaust could make carbon capture more practical for gas plants and other industrial facilities.
