Sorption of Soil Carbon Dioxide by Biochar and Engineered Porous Carbons

CO₂ is 45 to 50 times more concentrated in soil than in air, resulting in global diffusive fluxes that outpace fossil fuel combustion by an order of magnitude. Despite the scale of soil CO₂ emissions, soil-based climate change mitigation strategies are underdeveloped. Existing approaches, such as enhanced weathering and sustainable land management, show promise but continue to face deployment barriers. We introduce an alternative approach: the use of solid adsorbents to directly capture CO₂ in soils. Biomass-derived adsorbents could exploit favorable soil CO₂ adsorption thermodynamics while also sequestering solid carbon. Despite this potential, previous study of porous carbon CO₂ adsorption is mostly limited to single-component measurements and conditions irrelevant to soil. Here, we probe sorption under simplified soil conditions (0.2 to 3% CO₂ in balance air at ambient temperature and pressure) and provide physical and chemical characterization data to correlate material properties to sorption performance. We show that minimally engineered pyrogenic carbons exhibit CO₂ sorption capacities comparable to or greater than those of advanced sorbent materials. Compared to textural features, sorbent carbon bond morphology substantially influences low-pressure CO₂ adsorption. Our findings enhance understanding of gas adsorption on porous carbons and inform the development of effective soil-based climate change mitigation approaches.