Category: Peer-reviewed Publications

Peer-reviewed Publications

Knight et al. (2026): A review of carbon dioxide removal through concrete carbonation: key parameters and life cycle assessment

Kelli Anne Knight, Seth Kane, Patrick R. Cunningham, Rachel A Reimer and Sabbie A Miller, IN: Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ae73b3

Industrial sectors, especially those with significant global CO₂ emissions like the cement and concrete industries, are striving to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. It is anticipated that carbon dioxide removal will be required to meet these goals. Hydrated cement in concrete can react with atmospheric CO₂ to form carbonate minerals (i.e., carbonation), and in doing so, act as a carbon uptake mechanism. This carbonation process can be accelerated via various engineering interventions, such as crushing concrete after demolition. In this literature review, the authors examine key parameters, including porosity, exposure conditions, CO₂ concentration, curing methods, coatings, and supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), that facilitate CO₂ uptake in concrete to inform better quantification of life cycle emissions.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Schmidt & Hagemann (2026): Methane Emissions Offsetting With Temporary Carbon Sinks

Hans‐Peter Schmidt and Nikolas Hagemann, IN: Journal information and https://doi.org/10.1111/gcbb.70143

Methane accounts for more than 20% of current anthropogenic warming. While fossil methane emissions can likely be reduced substantially, biogenic methane from agriculture and waste will remain difficult to fully abate. Achieving climate neutrality therefore requires counterbalancing the warming effect of residual emissions. The rapid atmospheric decay of methane suggests that temporary carbon sinks can serve this purpose, yet current accounting approaches do not consistently quantify their time‐dependent cooling effect. Here the authors develop a time‐explicit method that enables offsetting the 100‐year warming impact of a methane emission pulse with an equally sized cooling effect delivered by carbon dioxide removal over 20 years. Based on a CO₂ atmospheric impulse–response function (IRF), the authors define the total climate effect (TCE) as time‐integrated warming and cooling of greenhouse gas emissions and dynamic carbon sinks expressed in CO₂‐equivalent units.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Van Dam (2026): Parameterizing air–sea CO₂ transfer in a macroalgal habitat and assessing its role in marine carbon dioxide removal accounting

Bryce Van Dam, IN: Limnology and Oceanography Letters, https://doi.org/10.1002/lol2.70139

Accurately quantifying air–sea CO₂ exchange remains a central challenge for the measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of marine carbon dioxide removal. The author applies direct eddy covariance measurements of CO₂ fluxes at a macroalgae-dominated coast to compile the first gas transfer velocity (k660) parameterization for such a habitat. k660 exhibited a quadratic dependence on wind speed of the form: k660 = 0.183 x U10² + 2.17.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Bolongaro et al. (2026): Life cycle assessment of solid calcium-looping direct air capture and its synergistic dual use for net-negative cement

Vittoria Bolongaro, David Yang Shu, Noah McQueen and André Bardow, IN: Chem Circularity, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.checc.2026.100037

Calcium-looping direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) is a mature technology with potential for gigatonne-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR), yet its environmental impacts remain insufficiently quantified. Here, the authors present the first prospective life cycle assessment of large-scale calcium-looping DACCS based on primary industrial data.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Winata et al. (2026): Investigating the Influence of Alkali Chloride Salts and Hydration on the Direct Air Capture Capacity of Polyethylenimine Films with Quartz Crystal Microbalance and Infrared Spectroscopy

Kayley Winata, Kayli Kuk, Christopher L. Soles and Avery E. Baumann, IN: Langmuir, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.langmuir.6c00429

With carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations on the rise, direct air capture (DAC) technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are attracting increased attention. One popular approach is to use aminopolymer sorbents, such as polyethylenimine (PEI), to absorb the CO₂ and capture it through chemical reactions with the amine groups. In practice, the CO₂ capture efficiency in aminopolymer sorbents strongly depends on the relative humidity, where the theoretical CO₂ capture efficiency can change by 2-fold in going from a dry to a humid environment through the formation of either an ammonium carbamate or carbamic acid capture product, respectively. In this study, the authors utilize monovalent chloride salts with increasing cation size (LiCl, NaCl, KCl, or CsCl) to modulate water uptake and thus product formation, quantified using both gravimetric and spectroscopic methods. The authors utilize tandem quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D) and polarization modulation infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy (PM-IRRAS) to decouple the individual uptake of CO₂ and H₂O from the total sorption mass.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Enebe et al. (2026): Rock powder amendment in enhancing plant-mediated carbon sequestration

Matthew Chekwube Enebe, Richard W. Griffin, Javad Barouei, Ram Ray, IN: Frontiers in Climate, https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2026.1863945

The global quest for controlling climate change and ensuring environmental sustainability has necessitated the need for the adoption of environmentally friendly measures for greenhouse gas emission control. These novel solutions for combating the rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions involves the amendment of soil with rock powder for enhancing rock weathering and carbon capture. Under the influence of plant roots rhizosphere effects (rhizosphere acidification and organic acid secretion) that control nutrients and ions flux, rock powder undergoes weathering to release nutrients for plant uptake. These nutrients promote plants overall productivity, and photosynthetic potential for optimum uptake and conversion of CO₂ into organic carbon. This process of enhancing plant health, productivity and carbon uptake in the presence of weathered rock mineral is term rock powder enhanced plant-mediated carbon sequestration. In fact, plant-mediated carbon sequestration centers on the biological and physiological processes of photosynthesis involving carbon uptake, conversion into organic carbon and storage in biomass and soil. Specifically, no existing enhanced rock weathering (ERW) review has systematically detailed and explained the mechanisms of plant-mediated carbon sequestration. Hence, in this review, the authors explored the multifaceted contributions of rock powder in promoting plant mediated carbon sequestration and soil inorganic carbon sequestration. The authors discuss the distinct mechanisms by which rock powder contributes to plant productivity and the accumulation of inorganic and organic carbon pools in the soil. Additionally, the authors discuss the factors affecting the efficiency of rock powder mediated carbon sequestration, showing the rationale behind the variations in the results obtained from different research projects.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

van Trinh et al. (2024): Effect of cyclone on the CO₂ separation characteristics of a vortex tube (The wave energy driven vortex tube synergy)

Ngoc Van Trinh, Younghyeon Kim, Wansung Pae, Seokyeon Im, Byoungjae Kim and Sangseok Yu, IN: Separation and Purification Technology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seppur.2024.130580

Carbon capture and storage has been suggested as a strategy for combating climate change. Cryogenic carbon capture has been demonstrated to effectively capture CO₂ from exhaust gas of fossil fuel combustion at the plant level, but it comes at the cost of high energy consumption. Vortex tubes are devices that mechanically separate compressed incoming gas into hot and cold streams that can potentially facilitate cryogenic carbon capture. In this study, a vortex tube was applied to separating CO₂ from an air/CO₂ mixture. The design of the vortex tube was modified by the addition of a specially designed vortex generator and a cyclone cone to the cold outlet. The effects of gravity, the inlet nozzle size, and shape of the cyclone cone were evaluated.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Zhang et al. (2026): Natural forest expansion is a larger carbon sink than secondary forests in moist tropics

Yihang Zhang, Viola H. A. Heinrich, Clément Bourgoin, Xia Wang, Xiaodong Li, Yun Du and Peter M. Atkinson, IN: Nature Geoscience, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-026-01984-5

Tropical secondary forests grow back naturally after the original forest has been cleared, while degraded forests comprise regrowth within forested land that has experienced partial structural and functional loss. Both represent important carbon sinks. However, natural forest expansion into originally unforested land also occurs, and despite covering 6% more area than secondary forests in the moist tropics, its carbon sink remains unquantified. Here the authors quantify the above-ground carbon sink and analyse its drivers across natural forest expansion, secondary forest and degraded forest by combining satellite-derived tropical moist forest changes with spaceborne LiDAR-derived biomass.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Maruyama (2026): Quantification of sequestered fossil-derived CO₂ in cementitious materials and its atmospheric contamination using carbon isotope measurements

Ippei Maruyama, Ryusei Igami, Ryo Kurihara, Masayo Minami, Hiroshi A. Takahashi and Abudushalamu Aili, IN: Cement and Concrete Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cemconres.2026.108290

Carbonation of cementitious materials has attracted increasing attention as a potential approach for CO₂ fixation. However, quantitative evaluation of the amount of CO₂ fixed from a designated source under accelerated carbonation conditions remains challenging, because atmospheric CO₂ mixing may occur. In this study, carbonation experiments were conducted on well-hydrated cement paste powders under controlled relative humidity conditions using fossil-derived CO₂, and carbon uptake and isotopic compositions were investigated using combined 13C and 14C analyses.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Xu (2026): Photosynthetic optimum temperature plays a minor role in the increase of terrestrial carbon uptake from 2000 to 2019

Chongyang Xu, Hongyan Liu, Dan Yakir, et al., IN: One Earth,

Global warming is altering the capacity of land ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a service provided by nature to lower the high carbon dioxide concentration in the air caused by human activities. However, the mechanisms behind the recent increase in the uptake of carbon dioxide remain uncertain. A widely held view is that plants and ecosystems keep pace with rising temperatures by adjusting the temperature at which photosynthesis performs best (photosynthetic optimum temperature). If true, this optimum temperature would play a central role in determining future carbon dioxide uptake and the lowering of its concentration in the air. However, recent observations reveal a mismatch. Maximum ecosystem photosynthesis has increased, but there is little evidence for a consistent global rise in the temperature optimum. To address this, the authors investigated whether enhanced photosynthesis under warming is mainly driven by thermal adjustment or by other processes.

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