Instant Genius - The tiny molecules tackling the planet’s biggest challenges

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

In this episode, we’re joined by Professor Omar Yaghi – a pioneer of materials chemistry whose inventions are shaping the future of clean energy, clean air, and even clean water. He’s best known for creating metal–organic frameworks, or MOFs, and covalent organic frameworks, COFs – ultra-porous materials that can capture carbon, store hydrogen, and even pull drinking water out of desert air. His work has opened up an entirely new field of chemistry, and his breakthroughs are now being developed into technologies that could help us tackle some of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In this episode, we're joined by Professor Omar Yagi, a pioneer of material science whose inventions are shaping the future of clean energy, clean air, and even clean water. He's best known for creating metal organic frameworks, otherwise known as moths and covalent organic frameworks, or coughs. These are ultra-porous materials that can capture carbon, store hydrogen, and even pool drinking water out of the driest desert air. His work has opened up an entirely new field of chemistry,

and its breakthroughs are now being developed into technologies that could help us tackle some of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. So, Professor Yagi, welcome to Instant Genius. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. So before we delve into some of the complex chemistry, reticular chemistry, it would be great to hear sort of about your career story as a whole, how it began and how it is that you ended up now being one of the leading figures in this new, exciting chemical space.

The first independent research position I obtained was at Arizona State University back in the early 1990s, I was less than 30 years old. And I wanted to solve a big problem in chemistry, and that is the problem of trying to make materials by design. And, you know, when I was a student, we were making materials in ways that we used to call shake and bake, meaning there was almost no logic to how we made them. So I thought that was not satisfactory,

and that if we could design materials in a deliberate fashion, almost like taking Lego pieces and putting them together to make different forms, that it would be quite revolutionary and very, very useful. So when I got my independent position at Arizona State University back in the early 1990s, that's what we set out to do. We succeeded in 1995 in doing exactly that because the difficulty that had stopped everyone from succeeding was trying to not just assess. these things but make them in an ordered form.

We call it crystalline form where every molecule that you've connected are systematically arranged in an orderly fashion so that one can characterize these at the atomic and molecular level. So that was the beginning in 1995 and since 1995 we've been making discoveries and progress almost every four or five years that have advanced this field to what it is today, which is being investigated and researched in almost 100 countries. And in the meantime, I have been hopping from one university to the other

in search of better facilities, stronger students, and so on. So I went to University of Michigan, then UCLA, and now I'm at UC Berkeley. I've been at UC Berkeley for the last 13 years, and I've been in research as an independent researcher for almost 35 years. So these materials by design that you speak of, the ones that you're perhaps most well known for, are metal organic frameworks or moths. I wonder if you could explain to our listeners, what are these materials and why are they so special and useful? Well, we call them moths and coves and so metal organic frameworks, that's moths and covalent organic

frameworks. The moffs have metal as a junction. Those metals are connected by organics to make frameworks. And the coughs are all organic. They don't have any metals. And so these materials are crystalline materials and they're built carefully from well-chosen molecular building blocks and they're linked together by strong bonds to make robust porous networks. They're really exciting because we can design them to perform a very specific function. For example, like capturing CO2 from air, or storing hydrogen or other such applications, taking water out of the air to make drinking water.

And the key here is that we can do this with great precision and in the end with great efficiency. And so one of the, as you said, These are porous materials. That's one of the benefits of them. I always found it sort of amazing just how much internal surface area these materials can have, some of the highest known internal surface areas. Just how big can this surface area get? And why is that useful?

What else makes these molecules useful? The surface area is what we call in day-to-day life, the footage. Okay? When you go to rent an apartment, you look at it. at how large is the apartment, that's the footage, that's the area of your apartment. And the same thing for a pinch of moth, okay, which would not look any, really not much different than a pinch of salt or granulated sugar. If you were to unfold that, you could cover an entire football field.

And so its footage or its surface area, its internal surface area, is over 7,000 square meters for each gram, for each pinch. Okay? And that's what makes them so useful because the larger that number is, the more carbon dioxide and other molecules that you could store. And that makes them extremely useful for not just plucking molecules out of air like CO2,

but also storing as much as you can into the pores so that the process is very energy efficient. I'm sure that that as a concept is the kind of thing that our listeners will find mind-boggling to try and think about how much square footage can be squeezed into a single gram. So what you're describing here is these molecules where you can stuff loads and loads of stuff into them and you can design them to be tuned in the perfect way to attract that stuff that you would. want like CO2 or water. That's right. So the power of this chemistry, the power of these materials is the ability

not just to make them by design, but also once you make them, you can go in and modify them, modify their pores, modify their internal surface area chemically, so that you can dangle those chemical entities that would provide. the sites onto which one can bring in the molecules, one can separate the molecules that you need, whether it is organics out of water, taking the organics out of water to purify water or CO2 out of the air.

You know, the separation of CO2 from air is a very difficult separation because you're trying to take, for each one CO2 molecule, there are 2,500 other molecules in the air. So it's a very difficult separation. And in order to do that, what we've done,

We've used moffs and coughs with high porosity, as I described before, but then we attach modules onto that internal surface area that are specific to just taking CO2 and nothing else out of the air. And that's really the power of this chemistry. They're incredibly specific and very efficient. And as you mentioned, they are customizable. It's not just for carbon capture, but these. functional units that we introduce into the pores of mobs could be designed to, for example,

take PFAS out of water, or organics out of water, or take water out of the air to make drinking water, or store hydrogen to make compact hydrogen into the pores. So many, and in fact, you could also, and as we have shown, almost 15 years ago now, we've shown that you can also stretch the pores so that you can allow large and larger molecules to move in and reside into the pores so that you can control them and manipulate them and transform them from something harmful into something harmless. So we can stretch, in fact, we can stretch these pores to be as large as to allow proteins and enzymes to pass through these pores. Much bigger molecules than carbon dioxide or water.

So obviously we've mentioned carbon dioxide removal from air a few times already, and I think it'd be good to dig down more into that. Why is it that we need carbon dioxide removal from air or direct air capture, as they call it? And why is it that moffs can allow us to do it in a way that we haven't been able to scale up and do efficiently so far? Very good question. Since the Industrial Revolution, we've been burning fossil fuels for energy. And this, the result of burning fossil fuel is that we emit CO2 into the air. We didn't have anywhere to trap the CO2 before it reaches the atmosphere. So now we have accumulated 1,100 gigatons a year of CO2 in the air.

This is extra CO2 that's beyond the natural amount that now exists in the air. Every year we are emitting, we, the global society, are emitting almost 35, maybe 40 gigatons. That's a lot of CO2, extra CO2 every year that's being emitted into the air. This CO2 is now agreed upon by scientists that it's harming our planet. It's causing global warming and that has a cascading effect on many things, such as, you know, intense weather patterns and frequent weather patterns in certain parts of the world. Arid areas becoming more arid, watered areas are becoming more watered, and the ocean level is rising and many, many other harmful effects on our planet,

melting of the ice caps and so on. So this has detrimental effect on our planet, this extra CO2, because it's changing the way our planet, a function in ways that are detrimental to our lives and our livelihoods for many parts of the world. So we need to find a way to take that CO2 out of the air. Now, that's not easy because you're trying to take, for each molecule of CO2 that's in the air, there are 2,500 other molecules like oxygen, nitrogen, in the air, right? So this is a difficult separation.

So not only do you need a material that separates that CO2 from the air, that plucks the CO2 out of the air, but you also need to make sure that that material can do this over and over again in a cycling pattern so that you don't have to change the material every time it absorbs the CO2 out of the air. So you need a material that's extremely stable and that's going to last in a plant for many, many, many years, taking CO2, concentrating it into the pores of the material, and then when the pores are filled, you can then release the CO2 and compact it, and then right now we are storing this under the ground in a safe manner,

or we're using it, at least in the laboratory now, we're exploring ways of taking that CO2 that we capture and convert it into something useful. So that's why carbon capture is extremely important, and until the work that we have reported, year with covalent organic frameworks or coughs, there wasn't a material that can take up CO2 from air and still maintain that stability that everybody was looking for. So this one is far more stable than anything that preceded it.

And that's really exciting in that now we have, let's say, a technical solution to solve the CO2 problem. And one of the other advantages of your material that you've developed, right, is the fact that not only can it cycle many, many times, and it's very good at uptaking CO2 from the air, but also the energy inputs to make it release that CO2 again is much lower than other types of carbon capture that are being developed as well, right? Good point. Yes, the ability, we're going back now to the ability to precisely design,

not just the framework, but the internal environment into which you're trapping that CO2. And the energy is directly proportional to how tightly the material is holding onto CO2. Okay, so you want a material that has affinity and selectivity to pluck CO2 out of the air, but at the same time, you don't want it to hold onto the CO2 so tightly that you need to heat it up to hundreds of degrees Celsius to remove the CO2. that's a lot of energy and it won't be economical if you have to heat up the material to such high temperatures. So the beauty of being able to design these materials in the way I have been describing is that you can modulate how tightly that CO2 could be bound into the pores. And indeed, in our case, CO2 could be removed at temperatures as low as 50 degrees Celsius.

And that's really exciting because that means that I could not just trap, the CO2, but remove the CO2 without having to put in a lot of energy. And indeed, because the temperature is about 50 degrees C that you have to use to remove the CO2, now you could use waste heat, industrial waste heat, okay? And therefore, the process becomes all of a sudden very energy efficient and economical. Which, yeah, as we've said, is the big problem with a lot of technologies for direct air capture, is that they're just not very cost-efficient. They're too expensive.

So this is very exciting. When do you think we might start seeing these materials used in this way for this application at a large scale? Well, let me just tell you what we're doing now. What we're doing now, we are addressing this problem on two fronts. One front is the energetics, right? Is that now we have the ability to store CO2 in an energy-efficient manner. And the other way to do it, of course, is to increase the uptake, right?

If you double your uptake, then now you can take up CO2 out of the air much faster than before for the same amount of material. Those are the two things we're working on. But the uptake capacity and the energetics of the system are favorable, and they are the best out there. So the next step is to scale up the material, right? to build the material from inexpensive building units and scale it up to ton quantities, hundreds of tons, 100,000 ton quantities eventually, right? So that we can have the scale that is required to actually make a difference in taking the CO2 out of the air on a massive scale. So that's the next step.

Moths, for example, we have worked on the scale up of moths and now they are routinely being scaled up to multi-ton quantities, hundreds of tons for removing CO2 from cement plants. That is something that's already being practiced by some of our collaborators like BASF supplying the MOF. What I really want to say, and maybe I'll repeat a little bit for clarity, is that the technical challenge of capturing CO2 from air, which using a very stable material, which is a problem that has been outstanding, is solved. The next step is scale up, and I don't see any impediments to achieving scale up to multi-tonn quantities. It's just a matter of time that we can

achieve that. So I would say that, you know, within the next year or so, we will see not just kilogram quantities, but potentially close to ton quantities of these covalent organic thermics being scaled up. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing flowing, I need a phone for you.

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Well, almost 5 billion people on our planet will experience water stress by the year 2030. This is according to the UN. Already, almost 2 billion people on our planet have a water crisis. They're not getting enough water for their needs. So either they live in arid regions of the world where there's not enough. and therefore not enough water to use, or they live in regions of the world where they're watered, heavily watered, but the water is not so clean. And so we have a water problem on our planet, and there's plenty of water in the air.

We have more water in the air than we have in rivers on our planet. So there's plenty of water in the air. So when you think about it, if we could take that water out of the air or some of it, not all of it, but some of it, out of the air, and using a moth, if you could tailor the pores of a moth so that it plucks water out of the air, concentrated in those pores I have described before, then I could have a way of making drinking water. And the way it would work is that the moth would be designed

so that it's specific to taking water out of the air, water goes in and it's compacted into the pores of the material. Now you have about 50% of the material water, okay? So the material is solid, but it's storing a lot of water. Now if I take that material and I put in a box and I expose that box to sunlight, now the box will heat up and water will come out. Of course, it's a closed box, so water will come out and condenses on the walls of the box. And now you have drinking water.

Well, that's exactly what we have been successful in doing. And we've tested such devices in the desert, where you're taking a moth and positioning it in a device and then exposing the moth to the air. Air passes through the moth and the moth extracts water. When the pores are filled, you close the device, expose it to sunlight, water comes off, And then you have basically clean water coming out, condensing out. Clean distilled water, the cleanest water you could ever make. And this was, we have tested the water for contaminants, metal or organic or any other contaminants.

It's ultra pure water. And if you want to drink it, it could be mineralized as we do with our drinking water. Or it could be used for agriculture without having to be mineralized. So given the fact that you have so much water in the air, this means that we have a new resource for water. And now we can deliver that water, or water could be created, could be generated, especially in the arid regions of the world. And in the water regions of the world, the same moth that works in an arid region would work even better in the watered regions where water is, you have plenty of water. but it's not clean. So what we're solving here,

what we're saying is that we can design moffs that work in all climates, regardless of weather anywhere in the world at any time of the day. And keep in mind that we have two generations of devices, devices that work with only sunlight, no other energy input aside from ambient sunlight, And we have devices that are electrified, and they would work as well and deliver even more water because you can do even more cycles when you have electrification. In both cases, we have the most energy efficient devices for capturing water from air and generating drinking water.

Now, some of the listeners might be thinking that we're drying the air and we're causing a lot of problems. just to give you an idea, there's so much water in the air that if we give 50 liters of water for every single person on our planet, we would have only used less than 0.1% of the water that's in the air. So there is no danger, at least in the foreseeable future, of having harmful effects as a result of taking water out of the air. And ultimately, because it's a water cycle, it will end up going back into the air once it's being used in one way or another. Precisely. Water is not getting destroyed. It's just getting used and then it goes back into the natural water cycle. That's exactly right. It is hugely exciting tackling some of the biggest problems that we have and this isn't science fiction in the future. This is very much happening now in the next few years. These technologies will be rolled out.

In my own lab, we've tested prototypes in the deserts, the driest deserts in the world, such as Death Valley and Mahavi Desert and Arizona Desert. And these materials work very well. And they can cycle for many, many years, for six to seven years of cycling without any damage done to the mop, without having to replace the moth. And now, Atoko has been diligent and, clever at designing devices that work passively, as I mentioned before, without electrification, just directly using ambient sunlight.

These prototypes that they have will deliver significant amounts of water, almost 800 liters of water per day. And they also have an electrified version of that that delivers almost 2,000 liters per day. And these would be, as I mentioned before, would be. the most energy-efficient devices for generating water anywhere in the world. So this is very, very exciting. We are at the cusp of rolling these out, and Atoku can even elaborate on that as needed.

Hopefully by this point in the podcast, our listeners who may never have heard of moths or coughs or reticular chemistry before have a good idea of why these materials are so exciting and how they're going to sort of change the world. But science is a process and you're not done yet. So what are the next breakthroughs in this type of chemistry that you're trying to pursue, how can we improve and get better? Well, I think to appreciate what the future looks like,

we need to think about what did we do here. And what we did is we open a gold mine where if you can think up a material that you want to make, now there is a way to make that material. from building units that are part of our natural environment, organics and minerals. You combine them, you make mobs. Or you combine the organics together without the metal to make cause.

This generated an extensive structure space, material space, and there's nothing like it in the history of humanity. And just to share with you my thinking is that we as humans will name periods of our civilizations after the materials that we've been using, whether it's the stone age, the brass age, the iron age, the glass age, the cement age, the silicon age, the pharmaceutical age. Well, I think we're looking at the reticular age. Riticular age with moths and coughs dominate our world to solve societal problems such as the ones, that I have been talking about, carbon capture and water, but also to build larger and larger economies.

Again, if you look at history, the way the economies grew larger as we learned how to design materials on a finer and finer level. And what's the ultimate level of design? It's really on the atomic and molecular level, and that's exactly what we're doing here. So I would say this is the century of moffs and coughs. And this is borne out and evidence by the fact that we've got 100 countries, researchers

and 100 countries pursuing this field, hundreds of startups that are focusing on commercializing this in addition to more established industries. So what does the future look like? Well, we've been in the last two years focusing on using AI and building models to exploit this massive space, right? because no human being alone or we will not be able, even as large as the chemistry society, the reticular chemistry society is,

we cannot exploit this entire space. So we wanna use AI. We already have published many papers on this to show the feasibility of using AI and generative models and LLMs first to exploit and explore this vast space. Second, to increase the rate of discovery. Instead of taking gears, we want to be able to do this in a very short time. And third, we want to be able to connect a chemical composition or a material to an application. Okay? So we want to be able to look at a material

and say, well, this will have this application. Or we want to be able to come up with an application and work backwards and say, I would like a material that does this and choose that material, be able to make, to make that material. So we're developing AI models to help us in speeding up discovery and in connecting materials to properties, properties to materials. So that's one aspect of the future. The other aspect that reticular chemistry has enabled is that not only are you starting out with a molecule and making the material,

but also you're taking that material and configuring it into a device, and then you're going and you're commercializing this. Well, all of this is connected by computation AI. And so if the device is not functioning as well as you would like, then you can go back to the molecule and the material and modify it so that it does. And of course, that's ideal for using computation AI, and that's exactly what we've been doing,

is we've been connecting the molecule to the material to the device that ultimately would be commercialized. All of this is being aided by AI, not just speed, but also exploitation of the different properties and making materials and devices that are energy efficient. So are we heading to a future where almost anyone can dream up an application and use AI to design the molecule that they require for it? My vision is that as we do with iPhones, I don't need to be an electrical engineer to operate my iPhone. And I think we, in the fullness of time, we will see that there are AI-driven laboratories where anyone, if they so desire, could, make materials and use them. And these AI-driven labs would be able to generate the optimal materials for specific applications. So yes, I see a future where you don't need

a chemist or a material scientist to generate a material that anyone who is interested in that topic could do this using these AI-driven laboratories. Obviously, we still need chemists and material scientists to work. on the basic research and to develop the scientific aspects. But I think in terms of scaling this on a worldwide scale, these AI-driven laboratories and what we've been trying to do here becomes extremely relevant. So that was Omar Yagi, a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley

and founder of Atoko, a company harnessing the power of moths and coughs to develop water harvesting and carbon capture systems. Thank you for listening to this episode. episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus. If you like what you just heard, then please consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to watch our presenters and guests speaking in person, then you can also check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now, and you can pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite

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