UCLA Chemical Engineer Receives Early Career Grant for CO₂ Capture

Carlos Morales-Guio, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a 2020 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award to support collaborative research in capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transforming it into solid carbon.

Joined by two other researchers, Morales-Guio and his colleagues each received a $55,000 grant announced last month. The trio is one of eight multidisciplinary teams awarded by the inaugural program of Scialog: Negative Emissions Science co-sponsored by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The initiative focuses on supporting research into novel technologies that could remove, sequester and utilize greenhouse gases.

Morales-Guio’s fellow grantees are Kathryn Knowles, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Rochester, and Robert Coridan, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Arkansas. The team will look into capturing carbon dioxide directly from air and converting it into solid carbon at low temperatures. The potentially efficient and low-cost method could produce a solid carbon for long-term carbon sequestration.

Morales-Guio joined UCLA Samueli in 2018 and directs the Laboratory of Electrochemical Systems Engineering. His research group seeks to understand how chemical reactions involved in the production of industrial chemicals, fuels and fertilizers are catalyzed, and how these same products could be extracted from water and air using renewable electricity instead of the traditional fossil sources.