A new porous material that may be useful for carbon dioxide capture is reported in Nature Communications this week. The relatively low-cost material shows high and reversible CO2 sorption capacities, and further development could lead to technologies for CO2 capture from the gases of coal-fired power plants.

Kai Landskron and co-workers used simple condensation reactions to produce porous electron-rich frameworks (PECONFs), which exhibit selective CO2 and methane sorption over nitrogen. Similar materials have been produced previously, but the porous frameworks reported by this team are prepared from inexpensive, commercially available materials.