Adsorptive separation of carbon dioxide: From conventional porous materials to metal–organic frameworks

Excessive CO2 emission is the main cause of global greenhouse effect. Separating CO2 from relevant sources such as flue gas, natural gas, and syngas may reduce emissions directly or indirectly by increasing the energy efficiency. Compared with amine absorption, adsorptive separation offers merits such as low energy cost, no corrosion, and many other advantages, and has attracted increasing attention, especially in the past 10 years. Different types of adsorbents such as activated carbons, zeolites, porous silica, porous polymers or porous organic polymers, and porous coordination polymers or metal–organic frameworks have demonstrated many unique characteristics for CO2 adsorptive separation. This review discusses the main challenges in CO2 adsorptive separation and analyses the strategies developed for the typical types of porous materials, especially for metal–organic frameworks.