Properties of Carbonic Anhydrase-Containing Active Coatings for CO2 Capture

Abstract

Carbonic anhydrase (CA)-based biological CO2 capture is emerging as a prominent carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. We developed a tagged CA–Ferritin chimera, resulting in a high-purity, high-activity, micrometer-sized CA aggregate, SazF, with a yield of 576.6 mg/L (protein/medium). SazF has an optimum temperature of 50 °C and demonstrates thermal stability between 40 and 60 °C. It operates efficiently in Tris–HCl buffer (pH = 8–9), making it compatible with ship exhaust conditions. For enhanced stability and reusability, SazF was encapsulated in SiO2 and integrated into an epoxy resin to produce a corrosion-active coating. This coating, applied to foam metal fillers, showed less than 3% protein leakage after ten days and retained over 70% activity after a month at 60 °C. This simple preparation method and the cost-effective production of these biomaterials that can continuously and efficiently absorb CO2 in high-temperature environments are suitable for most CO2 capture devices. They have a broad application prospect in the field of industrial carbon capture.