A research team at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) in Castelló, Spain, has developed a new class of salt-based absorbents that capture carbon dioxide directly from the air — and from other dilute gas streams — before releasing it again for reuse or storage. Led by Marcileia Zanatta at the Institute of Advanced Materials (INAM), the group has filed a Spanish patent and is now seeking partners to scale the salts from the laboratory into real operating environments.
Most carbon capture today relies on amine-based solvents. They work, but they degrade over time, can be volatile, and lose absorption capacity at the very low concentrations found in ambient air, where CO₂ makes up just 0.04% of the atmosphere. The UJI salts are designed to sidestep exactly those weaknesses: high uptake at low concentrations, strong selectivity for CO₂ over other gases, and stable, repeatable release.
In laboratory tests with both atmospheric air and industrial gas mixtures, the salts outperformed commercial benchmark absorbents, confirming a high absorption capacity at low CO₂ levels together with excellent selectivity. Just as important, the researchers describe the material as versatile and adaptable enough to slot into existing capture plants rather than demanding entirely new infrastructure.
Why this matters for Power-to-X
For Power-to-X, the interesting part is not the capture itself but what comes next. Every e-fuel, every litre of eMethanol and every batch of eSAF needs a carbon source, and the most credible source is recycled CO₂ — carbon taken from the air or from unavoidable industrial streams rather than freshly extracted fossil carbon. Anything that makes that carbon cheaper, cleaner and more reliable to supply lowers the cost of defossilised fuels and chemicals. A more durable, more selective absorbent that drops into today’s plants is exactly the kind of incremental win the sector needs.
The team sees applications well beyond climate-focused direct air capture: purifying gas streams and treating emissions in industry, upgrading biogas by removing impurities, and feeding gas-separation and synthesis processes in the chemical industry — including the manufacture of value-added products from recycled CO₂. That last category is Power-to-X territory in all but name.
The work has been validated at laboratory scale, so the usual caution applies: beating benchmarks on the bench is not the same as proving cost and durability at industrial volume. But with a patent filed and a search for industrial partners under way, this is a technology worth watching — one more sign that the carbon-supply side of Power-to-X is maturing alongside the electrolysers and reactors that tend to get more of the attention.
Source: Universitat Jaume I via EurekAlert! (26 June 2026).
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