A Texan team has invented a system for capture 99% of CO2 industrial using only cold water and pressure. It's called PICC (Pressure Induced Carbon Capture) and works like a fizzy drink: under pressure, the carbon dioxide dissolves in the water, and when you reduce the pressure, it pops back out. Cost? $26 a ton, compared to 50-100 of current technologies.
Lo Texas A&M University study It's dated November 13, 2025, and promises to make the decarbonization of power plants, steel mills, and cement factories economically sustainable. The best part? No degradable chemicals, just basic physics.
Capturing CO2 with Water: The Amine Problem
Traditional systems for capture CO2 with water (or rather, with chemical solutions) rely on amines, compounds that "bind" carbon dioxide from exhaust gases. They work, sure. But they have three annoying flaws: they cost a lot, they degrade when exposed to hot fumes from chimneys, and they never manage to capture more than 90% of the CO2That 10% that escapes into the atmosphere is a serious problem, especially now that decarbonization targets are becoming stringent. Mark Holtzapple, professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M and co-inventor of the PICC, explains that
“allowing 10% of CO2 to return to the environment is no longer acceptable.”
The PICC gets around the problem by using thephysical absorption instead of chemical ones. No molecular bonds to break, just CO2 that enters and exits the water based on the pressure. A bit like when you open a sparkling Coca-Cola and see the bubbles: everyone knows that at high pressure, carbon dioxide dissolves in water, and when you open the bottle, you see it come back out.
How the PICC works
The process starts with exhaust gases. Whether they come from a coal-fired, natural gas-fired, or biomass power plant, they are first cooled and compressed. They then enter an absorption column where cold water flows from above while gas rises from below, passing through structures that maximize contact between the two.
As the nearly clean gas reaches the top of the column, it encounters fresh water, which "captures" even the last traces of CO2. The cleaned gas is released into the atmosphere. The sparkling water (rephrased: carbon dioxide-laden) is transported to tanks at progressively lower pressures. At each stage, more CO2 pops out, ready to be compressed and stored in underground geological formations.
Economic analyses show that the PICC can capture and compress 99% of CO2 emissions for $26 a tonBy adding a small amount of lime to the water, you can achieve 100% capture for less than $28.
Industrial scale: it needs to work
Holtzapple and the co-inventor Jonathan Feinstein ExcelThermic Enterprises has already filed patents to license the "buzzing technology" to power plants, hydrogen production facilities, cement kilns, steel blast furnaces, and other large industrial emitters worldwide. The promise is tantalizing:
“Without adding CO2 to the atmosphere, the PICC allows us to use the abundant fossil fuels on which our civilization relies. And coupling PICC to biomass combustion, we can remove CO2 from the atmosphere in an economically sustainable way.”
The critical point, as always, is the transition from the laboratory to the planetary scale. The International Energy Agency It estimates that by 2025, global operational capture and storage capacity will reach just over 50 million tonnes per year. Net-zero pathways require 1.300 billion tonnes. The PICC, with its low costs and 99% efficiency, could significantly accelerate things. But it requires investment, infrastructure, and above all the certainty that it really works when you put it on a blast furnace or a chimney that spews fumes at 800 degrees. In other words: will it actually work as promised, or will it end up in the long list of “brilliant solutions on paper”? to capture CO2?
While waiting for the answer, it's worth toasting in moderation: perhaps with sparkling water.
