Photochemically-Driven CO Release Using a Metastable-State Photoacid for Energy Efficient Direct Air Capture.

One of the grand challenges underlying current direct air capture (DAC) technologies relates to the intensive energy cost for sorbent regeneration and CO release, making the massive scale (GtCO /year) deployment required to have a positive impact on climate change economically unfeasible. This challenge underscores the critical need to develop new DAC processes with substantially reduced regeneration energies. Here, we report a photochemically-driven approach for CO release by exploiting the unique properties of an indazole metastable-state photoacid (mPAH).