Focused on the Future
Photo by Evan Krape and courtesy of RepAir October 26, 2026
UD researchers, colleagues report advances in battery operated carbon capture technology
When the world transitioned from incandescent to LED-powered light bulbs, it was a big deal. LEDs consume far less energy to produce the same amount of light. They last longer while emitting less heat — science put to work to illuminate our world at lower energy costs.
At the University of Delaware, researchers have been working to reduce the energy cost of another challenge: removing carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, from the air. The potential benefits are both economic and environmental.
Now, UD inventor Yushan Yan and colleagues have shown it’s possible to efficiently capture carbon dioxide from air, a process called direct air capture, using a battery style system and electricity. The UD-developed method is built on the same chemistry used in rechargeable batteries and uses about 50% less energy than conventional systems. Since the technology is rechargeable, the system can be used again and again.
Concentrated carbon dioxide collected in this way can be stored, sold or upcycled into other products, from carbon dioxide for the beverage industry to preservatives in animal feed, possibly even jet fuel one day.
“Imagine adding a teaspoon of sugar to a gallon of water. The sugar dissolves readily, but recovering that tiny amount of sugar from the water is much harder. Capturing carbon dioxide from air presents a similar challenge.”
-Yushan Yan
UD researchers and collaborator RepAir Carbon, which licenses the technology, have demonstrated the method works both in the lab and at scale. They recently described their approach in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Energy.
“Even if we get rid of fossil fuels for everyday life and commit fully to renewables, we will still be emitting carbon dioxide,” said the paper’s first author James Buchen, a doctoral candidate working under the advisement of Yan in the Center for Clean Hydrogen (CCH). “Direct air capture is a way to offset these emissions.”
Operating in the gap where conventional technologies struggle
Current direct air capture technologies are energy-intensive and rely on heat, or thermal energy, to work. The best options available use or emit carbon dioxide as part of the thermal process.
The Yan lab focused on resolving this energy problem using electricity to capture carbon dioxide from air at room temperature.
The technology, which is based on early work at UD by Yan, Henry Belin du Pont chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and CCH director, leverages a patented membrane and direct air capture system invented at UD. The technology was licensed and commercialized by Versogen, headquartered on the University’s Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus.
The machinery uses a nickel hydroxide battery electrode to capture carbon dioxide from air on one side of the device, then release it in a purified stream on the other. The process consumes significantly less energy than conventional systems, less than one megawatt-hour per ton of carbon dioxide removed. When the electrode is discharged, the process continues by using a second battery electrode while the first is recharged.
The work is a collaborative effort with RepAir, which licensed and scaled the UD-developed technology into a pilot-scale device in Israel and successfully ran it for over half a year — more than 5,000 hours — demonstrating the device’s durability over time. RepAir further proved the technology is effective at scales necessary to operate in the real world.
Globally, researchers have been trying to reach $100 per ton as an acceptable cost for direct-air capture. “This technology brings those numbers within reach,” said Buchen.
Two large industries where direct-air carbon capture can have an impact are agriculture and construction, Buchen said. For instance, fertilizer for agriculture and concrete for construction produce significant carbon emissions. The research team imagines a world where we can balance these emissions and maintain these important industries for society.
Buchen and Teng Wang, a UD research associate, spent two years optimizing the electrochemical battery cell’s durability and function. Buchen also built the system used to test the battery cell and validate the method’s effectiveness.
While it will never fix the entire carbon emissions problem from large emitters, such as industrial furnaces and fossil fuel power plants, “direct air capture can effectively address emissions from distributed sources like agriculture and construction within cost and efficiency goals set globally,” said Buchen.
Yan likened the complexity of the problem to separating sugar water into its component parts.
“Imagine adding a teaspoon of sugar to a gallon of water,” he said. “The sugar dissolves readily, even without stirring, but recovering that tiny amount of sugar from the water is much harder. Capturing carbon dioxide from air presents a similar challenge and that challenge translates into energy cost of the direct air capture process.”
Innovation for today — and tomorrow
Yan said they chose the nickel-hydroxide chemistry that has been used in rechargeable batteries on purpose. Developing innovations that work within established supply chains and manufacturing capacity is part of Yan’s commercialization strategy, allowing his team to develop and bring technologies to market more quickly.
“We want to do innovative work but, even more, we want to commercialize technologies that we can see used in the world today,” he said.
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