Carbon capture will play a central role in helping the nations of the world manage and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Many materials are being tested for the purpose of capturing CO2. New results show that ordinary clay can work just as effectively as more advanced materials. "It is quite remarkable that clay can capture as much CO2 as other materials that are being investigated," says Jon Otto Fossum, professor at the Department of Physics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Clay offers many benefits compared to other materials, particularly because other potential materials can be expensive, difficult to produce, toxic and not particularly environmentally friendly.

A possible practical future use of this discovery could be to include clays in CO2 filters for industrial-scale CO2 emissions reduction.

"What we are doing is basic research," Fossum says. "It will take more research to develop the technology, so we don't expect clay-based CO2 capture to be readily available anytime soon."

Published in Scientific Reports NTNU researchers Leander Michels, a PhD candidate and Fossum led the research effort, in cooperation with researchers from the Institute for Energy Technology in Kjeller, Norway, and scientists from the Slovak University of Technology, the MaxIVLab at Lund University and the Universidade de Brasilia.

The results were recently published in Scientific Reports, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Nature Publishing Group.