Membraneless Electrochemical Design Slashes the Cost of Carbon Capture

Carbon capture has long been trapped in an uncomfortable trade-off: the technologies that work well in the laboratory tend to be too expensive, too energy-hungry or too fragile to deploy at the scale the climate crisis demands. Now, a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University has unveiled a redesigned electrochemical carbon capture system that removes one of the most stubborn bottlenecks in the field, replacing costly and failure-prone ion-exchange membranes with a solid-state counter-electrode architecture that is cheaper, more robust and easier to scale. The study, published in Nature Chemical Engineering, reports stable performance across hundreds of hours of continuous operation and, according to the team’s techno-economic modelling, a potential reduction in capture costs of nearly thirty percent compared with the membrane-based equivalent.

The approach belongs to a family of technologies known as electrochemically mediated carbon capture, or EMCC. Rather than relying on heat to strip carbon dioxide from a solvent, as conventional amine scrubbing plants do, EMCC uses molecular sorbents whose affinity for CO2 can be switched on and off simply by adding or removing electrons. In the capturing state, the sorbent molecule is reduced at an electrode and becomes a strong Lewis base that eagerly binds carbon dioxide. When the bound gas needs to be released, a small reverse voltage oxidizes the adduct, liberating a concentrated stream of CO2 and regenerating the sorbent for another round. Because the process is driven by electricity, it pairs naturally with renewable power and avoids the enormous thermal energy penalty that has historically made post-combustion capture so expensive.

In most demonstrations of this concept, however, the electrochemical cell has contained a critical complication: an ion-exchange membrane that physically separates the sorbent compartment from the counter-electrode compartment. The membrane’s job is to shuttle charge-balancing ions between the two sides while keeping the redox-active sorbent molecules away from the counter-electrode, where they would otherwise react indiscriminately. But membranes bring a long list of problems. They add resistance, which raises the voltage and therefore the energy cost of every cycle. They degrade in the organic solvents often used in these systems. They are expensive to manufacture in large areas, and their permselectivity is rarely perfect, allowing some sorbent to leak across and undermining efficiency over time. For a technology that aspires to gigatonne-scale deployment, the membrane has become a liability.

The Johns Hopkins team, led by corresponding author Yayuan Liu, set out to eliminate the membrane entirely by substituting a solid-state counter-electrode that can host the charge-balancing ions within its own crystal lattice. The idea sounds simple, but it collides with a fundamental obstacle that has deterred researchers for years: self-discharge. In a membraneless cell, the reduced sorbent molecules inevitably encounter the counter-electrode surface. If the counter-electrode is thermodynamically poised to accept their electrons, the sorbent will be re-oxidized there unintentionally, quietly undoing the capture chemistry and wasting the electrical energy that was invested in the first place. It is analogous to a battery that drains itself even when nothing is connected.

The pivotal insight of the new study is that this self-discharge is not governed by the thermodynamic driving force, as conventional wisdom assumed, but rather by kinetics, and specifically by the rate at which ions diffuse within the solid counter-electrode material. The team demonstrated that even when the thermodynamic potential difference between the sorbent and the counter-electrode would predict rapid parasitic reaction, a counter-electrode with sluggish solid-state ion transport can suppress the process to negligible levels. The practical consequence is profound: the design criterion for a membraneless capture cell shifts from hunting for counter-electrode materials with precisely matched redox potentials, a nearly impossible constraint, to selecting materials whose ionic diffusion is kinetically slow on the timescale of a capture cycle. That reframing opens a vastly larger palette of candidate materials.

Guided by this kinetic design rule, the researchers screened sodium intercalation compounds and identified sodium iron phosphate, NaFePO4, as an ideal partner for an azopyridine molecular sorbent dissolved in a DMSO electrolyte. Azopyridine is a nitrogen-rich organic molecule that reversibly binds CO2 in its reduced state, and sodium iron phosphate provides a lattice that accommodates sodium ions during charging but conducts them so sluggishly that self-discharge is effectively throttled. The system captures CO2 when the azopyridine is reduced at the working electrode while sodium ions insert into the phosphate counter-electrode, and releases the gas when the current is reversed and the sodium ions return to solution. The electrochemistry is elegant in its symmetry: the same ion traffic that stores charge in a sodium-ion battery underpins the capture and release of a greenhouse gas.

The experimental results are striking for their durability. The membraneless cell operated through 75 consecutive capture and release cycles spanning 350 hours, maintaining consistent CO2 capacity utilization and high Coulombic efficiency throughout. Equally important, the performance held up under conditions that matter in the real world rather than only in idealized laboratory settings. The system continued to function at high current densities, which determines how compact and productive a commercial module could be. It captured CO2 efficiently from dilute feed gases, the regime relevant to direct air capture, where the target gas is present at roughly 420 parts per million. And it tolerated aerobic environments, a notorious Achilles heel for redox-active capture chemistries, since oxygen competes for the electrons intended for the sorbent and can degrade it irreversibly.

To assess what these performance figures would mean commercially, the team built a techno-economic model comparing the membraneless architecture with its membrane-based counterpart. The analysis indicated a potential 28.9 percent reduction in the cost per tonne of captured CO2, driven by the elimination of membrane capital costs, reduced ohmic losses and the simplified engineering of a single-compartment cell. While the authors are careful to frame this as a projected figure rather than a demonstrated one, the magnitude of the savings is significant in a field where every dollar per tonne matters for adoption, particularly for direct air capture, where costs remain the central barrier to scale.

Beyond the specific materials pairing, the study establishes what the authors describe as a scalable and generalizable framework for next-generation electrochemical carbon capture. Because the key design principle is kinetic rather than thermodynamic, other sorbent chemistries, including quinones, alkoxides and redox-tunable Lewis bases explored by this and other groups, could in principle be matched with kinetically suppressive solid counter-electrodes without membranes. The conceptual bridge to battery science is also notable: the same intercalation compounds engineered for sodium-ion energy storage become enabling components of climate infrastructure, and the self-discharge problem they were designed to mitigate turns out to be the very lever that makes membraneless operation viable.

The work arrives at a moment when the urgency of carbon removal has never been clearer. Direct air capture and point-source capture both need processes that run on clean electricity, tolerate real-world gas mixtures and cost little enough to deploy by the thousands of tonnes. By eliminating the membrane and rewriting the design logic that had constrained the field, the Johns Hopkins team has taken a concrete step toward electrochemical capture systems that could eventually be manufactured as simply as batteries. Much work remains, from long-term degradation studies to fully continuous flow operation and pilot-scale demonstrations, but the 350 hours of stable membraneless cycling and the projected cost reduction suggest that the field’s most persistent architectural assumption was one it could finally afford to abandon.

Subject of Research: A membraneless electrochemically mediated carbon capture architecture using solid-state counter-electrodes to suppress self-discharge and reduce capture costs

Article Title: Electrochemically mediated carbon capture using a membraneless architecture

Article References: Liu, A., Mathur, A., Jayarapu, K. N., Li, Z., Li, T., McDaniel, G., & Liu, Y. (2026). Electrochemically mediated carbon capture using a membraneless architecture. Nature Chemical Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44286-026-00438-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44286-026-00438-4

Keywords: carbon capture, electrochemistry, membraneless architecture, sodium iron phosphate, azopyridine sorbent, self-discharge, direct air capture, CO2 removal, redox-active sorbents, techno-economic analysis, chemical engineering, climate technology