05/15/2026
Reducing our carbon emissions is necessary, but increasingly the science and engineering community are concluding that at current rates, it will not be enough on its own. At 428 parts per million and still rising, atmosphere CO2 will likely need to be actively removed, not just stopped at the source.
Such is the understood urgency of the problem, facilities designed to do exactly that are already under construction, the largest of which is in Texas, which is designed to pull ~500,00 tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year. This plant will be using an alkaline liquid that chemically binds the CO2 as it passes through. The basic principle works, and has been known for many years, but the detailed chemistry of how the process works, in the thin zone where air and liquid meet, is poorly understood. It is something of a black box; we know what goes in, we can measure what comes out, but we don’t really know what happens.
This means that there are real significant opportunities for optimization; even modest improvements in efficiency could translate to substantial reductions in cost and energy use. First, we need to get a clear picture of what is happening inside the black box.
Before you can optimize something, you have to be able to measure it. A team led by RASEI Fellow Wilson Smith worked through more than 70 design, print, and test iterations to build a bespoke flow cell that enabled them to watch the chemistry happening inside the ‘black box’ in real time. Think of it like medicine before medical imaging, you can understand a lot without being able to see inside, but the moment you can, everything changes.
Find out more about the process, what the team learned, and how they developed tools for future designs of carbon capture flow cells in our highlight article here:
May 2026
