Sequestration of CO₂ emitted from coal-fired power stations or industrial manufacturing plants is one way of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. An ideal CO₂ sequestration material should have large surface areas and strong adsorption sites that are accessible for ambient CO₂ gas.

Yoon Sup Lee and co-workers, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, have used ab initio calculations to analyze defect sites in boron nitride nanotubes (BNNT) for CO₂ absorption. They found that the protruding geometry of the boron antisite (B_N), in which a boron atom sits at the original nitrogen site and is surrounded by three boron atoms, facilitates CO₂ adsorption by reducing steric hindrance from the BNNT side wall.

The chemisorption energies on the B_N sites are greater than the standard free energy of gaseous CO₂, i.e., 0.67 eV at 300 K. This is implies that boron-rich BNNT should be able to capture CO₂ at ambient conditions.

• Ambient Carbon Dioxide Capture by Boron-Rich Boron Nitride Nanotube
  H. Choi, Y. C. Park, Y.-H. Kim, Y. S. Lee,
  J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2011.
  DOI: 10.1021/ja1101807