UK-headed carbon capture technology developer MOF Technologies Ltd (trading as Nuada) has announced that it has successfully completed the trial of its second pilot plant, Nuada Scout, at the Energy Innovation Centre (formerly TERC) at the University of Sheffield. Designed, built, and commissioned in under a year, the industrial pilot plant has been capturing carbon dioxide from biomass-derived flue gases at pilot scale, delivering one tonne of carbon dioxide capture per day with high purity and stable performance.
According to Nuada, its technology is more efficient and cost-effective, requiring 90 percent less energy than conventional approaches.
The system passes industrial emissions through a sponge-like metal-organic framework (MOF) sorbent material, which selectively adsorbs carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules.
A vacuum pressure swing adsorption (VPSA) process is then used to efficiently extract the captured CO2, without the need for large-scale chemical plants or complex infrastructure.
Conventional carbon capture methods rely on energy-intensive processes and require large, capital-heavy installations. Their complexity and infrastructure demands make carbon capture deployment costly and disruptive for industrial emitters/sites.
In contrast, Nuada’s approach has the potential to eliminate the need for large chemical processing systems, offering a compact, easy-to-integrate, and lower-energy solution suitable for widespread industrial deployment.
The pilot forms part of a project awarded funding via the CCUS Innovation 2.0 programme, as part of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s £1 billion Net Zero Innovation Portfolio.
Visitors from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, and Nuada’s investors recently viewed the pilot plant in operation and heard more about the company’s progress.
Key outcomes from the Nuada Scout pilot include:
- Capture of 1 tonne per day of CO2 from energy-from-waste (EfW) and biomass flue gas;
- Stable MOF-VPSA operation demonstrated at pilot scale;
- Validation of platform performance across both biomass and cement applications.
With this second successful pilot, Nuada is ready to move from demonstration to commercial-scale deployment. Our low-energy, compact system removes the cost and integration complexity barriers that have long held back industrial carbon capture. Carbon capture must move from aspiration to implementation. This pilot proves that Nuada’s technology is ready to meet that challenge practically, affordably, and at scale, said Dr Conor Hamill, co-CEO at Nuada.
