Nitrogen-Rich Porous Adsorbents for CO2 Capture and Storage

The construction of physical or chemical adsorbents for CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) is a vital technology in the interim period on the way towards a sustainable low-carbon future. The search for efficient materials to satisfy the increasing demand for CCS has become extremely important. Porous materials, including porous silica, porous carbons, and newly developed metal-organic frameworks and porous organic polymers, possessing regular and well-defined porous geometry and having a high surface area and pore volume, have been widely studied for separations on laboratory scale. On account of the dipole-quadrupole interactions between the polarizable CO2 molecule and the accessible nitrogen site, the investigations have indicated that the incorporation of accessible nitrogen-donor groups into the pore walls of porous materials can improve the affinity to CO2 and increase the CO2 uptake capacity and selectivity. The CO2-adsorption process based on solid nitrogen-rich porous adsorbents does generally not require heating of a large amount of water (60-70wt%) for regeneration, while such a heating approach cannot be avoided in the regeneration of amine-based solution absorption processes. Thus, nitrogen-rich porous adsorbents show good regeneration properties without sacrificing high separation efficiency. As such, nitrogen-rich porous materials as highly promising CO2 adsorbents have been broadly fabricated and intensively investigated. This Focus Review highlights recent significant advances in nitrogen-rich porous materials for CCS.