fossil fuels will necessarily continue in the near term, carbon capture (and sequestration) is widely acknowledged as a necessary carbon abatement strategy. As such, scientific research in recent years has focused with new energy on developing fundamental understanding and control of CO 2 uptake in solid-state materials. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] In particular, the molecular level control of CO 2 adsorption/absorption in porous structures with a high density of strong binding sites has been targeted as a means of tailoring their performance for various carbon capture processes. For example, porous carbons, zeolite, and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been modified with various N-functionalities to enhance their reactivity toward CO 2 . [5][6][7][8] Tunable porous solids are capable of achieving both high capacities and high selectivities for binding CO 2 , [4][5][6][7][8][9][10] rendering them potential candidates for postcombustion CO 2 capture at low pressures (<0.15 bar) and mild temperatures (25-70 °C). [2,3,8,11] Aside from postcombustion Leveraging molecular-level controls to enhance CO 2 capture in solid-state materials has received tremendous attention in recent years. Here, a new class of hybrid nanomaterials constructed from intrinsically porous γ-Mg(BH 4 ) 2 nanocrystals and reduced graphene oxide (MBHg) is described. These nanomaterials exhibit kinetically controlled, irreversible CO 2 uptake profiles with high uptake capacities (>19.9 mmol g −1 ) at low partial pressures and temperatures between 40 and 100 °C. Systematic experiments and first-principles calculations reveal the mechanism of reaction between CO 2 and MBHg and unveil the role of chemically activated, metastable (BH 3 -HCOO) − centers that display more thermodynamically favorable reaction and potentially faster reaction kinetics than the parent BH 4 − centers.Overall, it is demonstrated that size reduction to the nanoscale regime and the generation of reactive, metastable intermediates improve the CO 2 uptake properties in metal borohydride nanomaterials.
CO 2 UptakeThe ORCID identification number(s) for the author(s) of this article can be found under https://doi.