KACST Showcases its Contributions, Innovations to the World

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KAUST), within the Kingdom’s delegation participation, at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change hosted by Glasgow, in its “COP2 26” edition, presented its efforts in the field of carbon reduction, capturing or sequestration, use and storage technologies, with the aim of providing scientific support for commitments, in the Kingdom to reach carbon neutrality by 2060.

During the participation, the city presented new technologies in the field of carbon capturing to develop “organic metal framework materials”, in cooperation with international universities and research centers.

These technologies depend on building organic and inorganic blocks that form a porous structure of atoms, in the form of a network to store molecules in them, making them promising compounds for use.

In carbon storage applications, the use of this technology, in solar-powered systems has a power consumption equivalent to 1 kw/h.

The city highlighted its efforts in the field of reducing carbon emissions, through the development of many technologies, aimed at improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines, which contributes to reducing fuel consumption rates by approximately 20%.

In turn, it helps reduce negative effects on the environment, in addition to developing innovative biofuel formulations, that contribute in improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines, significantly, facilitating the process of controlling emissions in the transport sector, constituting about 20% of the total carbon emissions in the Kingdom.

In the field of carbon use, the city presented the research it is implementing to use carbon gas in the production of materials of high economic value.

It also highlighted a project to convert carbon dioxide directly into liquid hydrocarbon fuel that could pave the way for carbon-neutral flights, which is implemented by its scientists, in cooperation with their foreign counterparts, at the University of Oxford, and the efforts that the research team is working on to improve the innovative conversion method, and the performance of the catalyst.

 The city has provided laboratory research in the field of carbon storage to study the injection of carbon dioxide gas into rock samples, to sequester it and use it to improve oil extraction and production, in an advanced way, as the Kingdom enjoys sedimentary basins.

A giant that contains huge quantities of oil and gas, geologically proven, and uses advanced techniques and equipment, which increases confidence in the storage capacity and reduces costs related to the storage process, grace to technical capabilities and association of storage, with improved oil recovery operations.

The results showed an improvement in the rate of additional production by 40%, in addition to sequester a proportion of the carbon, in these layers.