{"id":241868,"date":"2026-07-30T20:02:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T01:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/pulling-graphite-out-of-thin-air"},"modified":"2026-07-30T20:02:50","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T01:02:50","slug":"pulling-graphite-out-of-thin-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/pulling-graphite-out-of-thin-air","title":{"rendered":"Pulling Graphite Out of Thin Air"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/pulling-graphite-out-of-thin-air.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Graphite, the carbon center of your humble #2 pencil, is also an essential component in technologies such as batteries, smartphones, laptops, and industrial power equipment. Today, nearly all of this critical mineral has to be mined and processed and, in the United States, imported.<\/p>\n<p>But now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and Estonia\u2019s National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics have shown a promising way to convert waste carbon pulled from the air into graphite, opening up a potential alternative to mining. The work was published recently in the journal <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-026-70977-0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Nature Communications<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers built a custom microscope setup to watch a process known as molten-salt electrolysis, which uses electricity and hot liquid salts to turn carbon dioxide into solid carbon. For the first time, researchers were able to watch the process in real time inside the corrosive, 500-degree-Celsius molten salts while the system was running.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Graphite, the carbon center of your humble #2 pencil, is also an essential component in technologies such as batteries, smartphones, laptops, and industrial power equipment. Today, nearly all of this critical mineral has to be mined and processed and, in the United States, imported. But now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s Lawrence Berkeley [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1523,1512,219,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-computing","category-mobile-phones","category-physics","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}