Capturing and transforming
CO₂ to mitigate climate change

The existential threat of climate change is largely driven by the excess release of greenhouses gases into our atmosphere, mainly carbon dioxide—CO₂—which traps heat and leads to the overall warming of our planet.

CO₂ concentrations have risen more rapidly in recent decades than at any other time in human history, driven primarily by fossil fuels burned for power and transportation^{1 2}.

This will likely lead to higher levels of carbon dioxide by 2025 than those seenduring the warmest period of the last 3.3 million years³.

Governments and corporations, including IBM, are cutting CO₂ emissions to help keep the global temperature from rising an additional 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels —a tipping point beyond which polar ice could melt causing catastrophic damage⁴. But the expanding use of fossil-fuel burning power sources jeopardizes those efforts and our chances to meet that target⁵. Large-scale CO₂ capture technologies and solutions are an essential part of our journey to net zero emissions.

Until now, typical approaches to capture emitted CO₂ have included chemical absorption and using membranes to filter the CO₂ from other gases. But these processes, while efficient in terms of the amount of CO₂ removed, are still too energy intensive and costly for widespread global use.

We need new materials and processes to capture CO₂ on a global scale. Using the accelerated discovery cycle, we will understand what materials and methods exist today so scientists can identify areas ripe for discovery.

A team of IBM researchers are creating a cloud-based knowledge base of existing methods and materials to capture CO₂. It employs IBM technology for annotation and natural language processing to mine information contained in patents and papers and applies AI to digest information and present findings to the researcher, like a ranking of the best-known materials for CO₂ separation.

Based on this knowledge, scientists are able to define desired properties of molecules to be considered for CO₂ capture and separation processes. Teams can then employ AI algorithms to predict the optimal molecules to be used as building blocks for more effective polymer membranes for CO₂ separation.

Once captured, CO₂ can be put to use. IBM researchers are also working on a sustainable materials development platform for harnessing CO₂ as a feedstock or raw material for monomers and polymers such as plastic. The new CO₂-based materials are designed with a focus towards recyclability that allows for recovery and reuse.

Progressing carbon capture and sequestration before it’s too late requires an acceleration of the discovery process through the close integration of high-performance computing infrastructure, sophisticated AI systems, and AI-guided automatic lab experiments to test large numbers of chemical reactions. The reactions should illustrate the design rules for molecules and chemical processes that enable the efficient synthesis of materials optimized for CO₂ capture, separation and conversion.

The goal over the next five years is to make CO₂ capture and reuse efficient enough to scale globally so we can significantly reduce the amount of CO₂ released into the atmosphere and, ultimately, slow climate change.