Review on Advances and Prospectives of Direct Air Capture: Thermodynamic Verification, Optimized Material Selection, and Technical Economic Assessment for the Application

Abstract

To mitigate the rising threat to global climate aroused by dramatically increasing anthropogenic CO₂ emissions in recent years, the Paris Agreement sets a goal of limiting the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 to 2 °C over preindustrial times. Traditional negative emissions technologies (NETs) are important approaches to reach that goal, but it is still not enough from a long-term perspective. Therefore, the research on direct air capture (DAC) is imperative now as a new promising approach. This paper first summarizes the different systems DAC can deal with, such as gas/solid, gas/liquid, and gas/polymer systems, and then illustrates the thermodynamic feasibilities of DAC under each condition. From a perspective of industrial practice, the review presents several hopeful chemical technologies from many aspects including capturing material, process flow, and techno-economic analysis, with contents allocated by the maturity of the technology. This review especially analyzes demonstration plants like Climeworks and explores experiences about how to transform early laboratory results based on unit operation into large-scale production. Finally, this review discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the technologies mentioned and provides some suggestions for future research and development.