In the combat against climate change many attempts are made to drastically reduce the increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. A rapidly applicable technique is storing CO2 in the ground. Niels Meis describes in his thesis an efficient way to prepare CO2 for storage: concentrating it in hydrotalcite, a specially developed clay.

This is usually done at high temperatures, which demands much energy. After the CO2 is concentrated, it is removed from the clay and permanently stored, and the clay is reused.
The clay absorbs little CO2, but Meis demonstrates that much more CO2 is absorbed when put on carbon nanofibers. Thus, the clay absorbs 25 times as much CO2. Adding potassium carbonate as well gives a further increase of capacity. The higher capacity is caused by increased disorder in the clay on the carbon nanofibers.

Niels Meis also developed a new material (potassium carbonate carbon nanofibers) to concentrate CO2 at low temperatures. This material has a very high CO2 capacity and it is easy to recover the concentrated CO2 from the material. This saves an enormous amount of energy and makes the material suitable for for instance power stations.