At Sandia, an engineer’s porous liquids research may offer a new weapon against contaminants

Jessica Rimsza, a materials engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, is discovering new ways to store gas in liquids.

It’s an elegant and simple idea. But porous liquids — materials which feature the porosity of solids in the form of tiny cavities and the fluidity of liquids — were not conceptualized until relatively recently, in 2007, when Stewart James published a paper on the topic at the University of Belfast, Rimsza said in an interview.

“But the important thing is that he published it without any data,” Rimsza said. “He just said, ‘This is a cool thing that might work.’”

But recently, the possibilities of porous liquids have grabbed the imaginations of scientists across the world. In 2025, Omar M. Yaghi, a Jordanian-born chemist, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work at the University of California, Berkeley, on metal-organic frameworks, which the prize committee describes as “porous materials in which metal ions and long carbon-based molecules form crystals with built-in cavities.”

“These are possible to use, for example, to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyse chemical reactions,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee says.

“And that’s one of the materials that we use in our porous liquid,” Rimsza said

Her team created a broad-based patent for what they’re calling LEAP-L technology, or Low-cost, Low-energy Absorption with Porous Liquids. The Sandia researchers say their LEAP-L technology “captures carbon dioxide using novel porous liquid made from a 2D metal-organic framework … ”

“The reliance on energy sources like biogases, natural gas and fossil fuels in industrial processes has increased the release of contaminants into the atmosphere,” a market sheet by Sandia describing the patent says. “Contaminants can contribute to long-term environmental challenges such as deteriorating air quality, changes in atmospheric composition, and acid rain. There is an urgent need for energy-efficient and cost-effective technologies for gas capture and separation.”

The technology enables the capture of methane from biogas created in waste such as food scraps, manure, sewage and agricultural industrial byproducts. The Sandia researchers hope the technology can one day efficiently trap and separate biogases at industrial facilities.

New Mexico Gas Co. sees promise in the research. The company wrote a letter of support for the technology to receive an R&D 100 award, R&D World magazine’s list of the top inventions of the year. Companies write such letters “that essentially testify to the fact that this might be useful on an industrial scale,” Rimsza said.

Now that Rimsza and her team have designed and tested porous liquids, they are testing how they “will behave in a more realistic system,” such as piping, she said, so that companies will not have to make big capital expenditures or redesign workflows to fit the technology. The next phase is pilot-scale testing, for which the team already has intellectual property developed.

The commercial potential of porous liquids is vast. But for a scientist such as Rimsza, underpinning those is a new way of looking at the world.

“It sort of unlocks fundamental questions about surface science right now,” Rimsza said. “How your solvent is interacting at the surface level with your porous material. Questions about porosity. How empty does that pore have to be, and what is the nature of porosity?

“So that’s what’s really exciting to us, is that it’s sort of upending our thought processes about how you do separations, moving away from a solid state and into the liquid state when things become much more interesting and complicated.”

Justin Horwath covers tech and energy for the Journal. You can reach him at jhorwath@abqjournal.com.