The increase of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is relentless. The Paris Agreement signed in December 2015 at COP-21 has the ambition to limit the increase in the average global temperature to only 1.5 ˚C above pre-industrial levels by the development of strategies aimed to the reduction of greenhouses gas emissions to be communicated by 2020. The emissions reductions promised at Paris fall far short from achieving this goal.

In fact, the Paris Agreement considers only the abatement of future anthropogenic emissions. Nevertheless, its goal can be realized only if the present excess of atmospheric CO₂ is removed from the atmosphere. Air capture (AC) is a prime contender for delivering such reductions. Because AC technologies do not need to be integrated with CO₂ emitters, they can lower the impact of anthropogenic sources, as transportation, for which an integrated capture technology is hardly applicable. For some AC solutions a portable version can be also imagined with the double advantage to avoid the construction of dedicated plants and to allow an active public engagement. Even though AC is characterized by the largest thermodynamic cost among all carbon dioxide capture technologies, due to the larger dilution of CO₂ in the air (400 ppm) , this cost is still much smaller than the actual energy investments currently used. The ideal materials for AC would possess two oxymoronic properties: an exceptional affinity towards CO₂ and a low energy demanding CO₂ release. This represents a real challenge in Materials Science. Strategies reported in the literature are then not only considering materials design but also process design and the possibility to couple the capture step with end uses that would allow to slash CCS costs.

Scientific solutions proposed so far are countless. This symposium will host representative speakers for the different AC strategies and it contemplates a tutorial where it will be discussed the problems to quantify, on a common basis, practical points as the time for the construction of the infrastructure, the total time necessary to capture all the excess, the cost per ton of CO₂.

Joint Sessions are being considered with Symposium NM04—Nanomaterials and Nanomanufacturing for Sustainability.

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