A battery-like system reported by MIT on October 24, 2019, captures carbon dioxide while charging and releases a concentrated stream when discharging. Its electrodes use polyanthraquinone combined with carbon nanotubes, and the process runs at room temperature and ordinary air pressure. The team said it could work even at the roughly 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in ambient air. [shared-d273bd5e35852ae13bb40fd7da165d602acc1abbe7a94bff4a38669e8e5912a9]
That low-concentration claim matters because equipment designed for exhaust faces a different job from equipment drawing directly from air. In a proposed power-plant arrangement, two cell stacks would alternate: one captures while the other releases its collected gas. The setup could keep both stages operating, but it was an example, not evidence of a deployed facility. [shared-d273bd5e35852ae13bb40fd7da165d602acc1abbe7a94bff4a38669e8e5912a9]
The clearest durability evidence was laboratory evidence: the cells endured at least 7,000 charge-discharge cycles, with efficiency down 30 percent over that span. Researchers estimated that design changes might raise life to 20,000–50,000 cycles; those figures were projections, not results. Verdox had been formed to commercialize the process, and a pilot plant was a future goal. The test ahead is whether cycle life and performance hold in a real system—and what the full costs are. The announcement established neither commercial scale nor those costs. [shared-d273bd5e35852ae13bb40fd7da165d602acc1abbe7a94bff4a38669e8e5912a9]