Abstract
Developing a direct carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and methanation method is one of the most important challenges to achieving carbon neutrality. However, converting CO2 into methane (CH4) kinetically requires the activation of stable CO2 at high temperatures (300–500 °C), while the CO2-to-CH4 conversion thermodynamically favours low temperatures. Here we report an efficient mechanochemical CO2 capture and conversion under mild conditions (65 °C). Using commercial zirconium oxide (ZrO2) and nickel catalysts, the mechanochemical CO2 capture capacity was 75-fold higher than the conventional thermochemical process. The mechanochemical CO2 conversion reached a nearly quantitative CO2 conversion (99.2%) with CH4 selectivity (98.8%). We determined that repeatedly induced abundant oxygen vacancies on ZrO2 by dynamic mechanical actions are responsible for efficient CO2 capture and, thus, subsequently spontaneous methanation.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by research programmes (RS-2023-00221668, RS-2024-00435493 and RS-2024-00466616 to J.-B.B.) through the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea, Carbon Neutrality Demonstration and Research Center (1.240027.01 to H.L.), National Natural Science Foundation of China (21873088 to Q.X.L.) and the Innovation Program for Quantum Science and Technology (no. 2021ZD0303306 to Q.X.L.). The computational resources are provided by the Supercomputing Center of University of Science and Technology of China.
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J.-B.B. conceived the project and oversaw all the research phases. R.G. conducted experiments and characterizations. L.S. carried out DFT calculations. J.G. performed the economic analysis. C.L., J.-M.S., B.-J.J., S.-H.K. and J.K. helped with characterizations. J.-M.S. helped with visualization. R.G., L.S., J.G., H.L., Q.X.L. and J.-B.B. co-wrote the paper, and all the authors commented on it.
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Presentation of mechanochemical CO2 methanation.
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Guan, R., Sheng, L., Li, C. et al. Mechanochemical carbon dioxide capture and conversion. Nat. Nanotechnol. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-025-01949-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-025-01949-6
