TECHNOLOGY: ExxonMobil inks Agreement with Mosaic
ExxonMobil has announced an agreement with California start-up,
Mosaic Materials, a chemical and engineering company.
According to Mosaic, the company has developed a process to separate carbon dioxide from air or flue gas using porous solids.
The technology is based on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). MOFs generally comprise two components: a grouping of metal ions and an organic molecule linking the metal ions.
Occasionally referred to as a class of nanoparticles, they are unique in that a single gram can have a surface area of 10,000m
2.
They are particularly promising for CCS in industrial applications because of their low heat capacities.
The US Department of Energy has undertaken a number of projects on MOFs in relation to carbon capture. According to one study, using MOFs would be around 15 per cent cheaper than other systems.
Mosaic Materials was spun out of the University of California Berkley (UCB) as a commercial venture. Earlier demonstrations of its MOF technology for CCS were seeking to develop the MOFs into a pelletised form.
Moasic CEO Thomas McDonald said that the company’s “proprietary technology allows us to separate carbon dioxide from nearly any gas mixture using moderate temperature and pressure changes, substantially increasing energy efficiency and decreasing costs.”
The company has also received funding from the Office of Naval Research to scrub CO
2 from air in submarines, and similar defence applications.