<p>Efficient and sustainable methods for carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>)
capture are essential. Its atmospheric concentration must be reduced to meet
climate change targets, and its removal from sources such as chemical feedstocks
is vital. While mature technologies involving chemical reactions that absorb CO<sub>2</sub>
exist, they have many drawbacks. Porous materials with void spaces that are complementary
in size and electrostatic potential to CO<sub>2</sub> offer an alternative. In
these materials, the molecular CO<sub>2 </sub>guests are trapped by noncovalent
interactions, hence they can be recycled by releasing the CO<sub>2</sub> with a
low energy penalty. Capacity and selectivity are the twin challenges for such porous
adsorbents. Here, we show how a metal-organic framework, termed MUF-16 (MUF =
Massey University Framework), is a universal adsorbent for CO<sub>2</sub> that
sequesters large quantities of CO<sub>2</sub> from a broad palette of gas
streams with record selectivities over competing gases. The crystallographically-determined
position of the CO<sub>2</sub> molecules captured in the framework pores illustrate
how complementary noncovalent interactions envelop CO<sub>2</sub> while
repelling other guest molecules. The low affinity of the pore environment for
other gases underpins the strikingly high selectivity of MUF-16 for CO<sub>2</sub>
over methane, nitrogen, hydrogen, acetylene, ethylene, ethane, propylene and
propane. Breakthrough gas separations under dynamic conditions benefit from
short time lags in the elution of the weakly-adsorbed component to deliver a
repertoire of high-purity products. MUF-16 is an inexpensive, robust, recyclable
adsorbent that is universally applicable to the removal of CO<sub>2 </sub>from
sources such as natural gas, syngas, flue gas and chemical feedstocks.</p><br>