Metal Organic Frameworks

Jake Correll, an old friend of mine who happens to be indolently brilliant, told me of pod casts to NPR available for free on iTunes. I got on board this afternoon, and listened to one from Science in Action, 17 April 08.

There was a lot of blather about gravity and not weighing the same in different locations of the globe. But hidden neatly away at about 20 minutes, was a piece on the works of Professor Omar Yagi and his research team on something called metal organic frameworks, or MOFs. All dry jokes aside, it was an interesting piece, detailing the capability of the team to produce crystals (the MOFs) that would store the equivalent of 40 tennis courts of gas per gram of crystal. The team had successfully done this with methane and carbon dioxide, and were working on the process for hydrogen (for use in hydrogen cell cars). Quite frankly, they seem hell-bent on getting to the hydrogen application, but I haven't heard much of their use to start filtering carbon out of the atmosphere to stop or at least mitigate global warming. I guess the financial gain available for getting to that hydrogen car exceeds the need to filter power plants and vehicles?

However, one point that disturbed me was simply, what happens when you've filled the crystals with the carbon? I mean, the crystal doesn't take the carbon, produce a chemical reaction, and voila: oxygen (I don't think that's possible without some manner of alchemy, but then, I'm not a chemist). Instead, it stores it. That is the very nature of what got us here to begin with: out of sight, out of mind. Think about the 80's and the repeated incidents of corporations dumping their toxic waste into the ocean. Okay, we stopped that, but did you ever ask, where is it now? Radioactive Isotopes with a half life of 10,000 years sitting only God knows where. These crystals have the potential to become those barrels full of radioactive sludge. We remove the carbon from the air, but where will we store the crystals? What will happen as the crystals decay? Why do we, as humans, have to look further than natural law to find the solution to such a simple problem?

The complexity of the global warming problem is not in the solution; it's in the inability of us to forego our comfort level for the sake of our environment or, our profit in the case of the oil companies.