Amidst the proliferation of material technologies developed to solve the problems of planetary climate change and carbon emissions, the technoscientific community increasingly champions a new molecular hero: metal organic frameworks (MOFs). Metal organic frameworks are an emergent generation of material technologies lauded for their capacity to capture and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) within their porous structures. They are among the most widely researched materials within the fields of climate science, materials science, and various (sub)disciplines of chemistry, heralded for potential applications that include yet exceed carbon capture and sequestration. Their synthesis anticipates infinite configurations of matter and materiality at the molecular scale, with an equally infinite array of applications. This article examines the promise and porosity of MOFs created to capture CO2 and an expanding array of technoscientific actors and interests.
This article contributes to a Platypus series on pores, introducing MOFs to Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology and adjacent fields by situating these material technologies through the critical analytics of porosity and promise. Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are material technologies synthesized by assembling organic linkers and transitional metals (cobalt, magnesium, etc) into a matrix of porous layers, creating channels wherein CO2 is selectively captured and stored. Porosity is the defining feature of MOFs, structurally configured to correspond with the molecular arrangement of CO2. Yet, MOFs are more than molecular actants enabling a view to chemical interactions. They extend a vibrant lineage of STS and Anthropological scholarship attending to ‘pores’ as new sites of theory and experimentation (Felt et al., 2016; Jasanoff et al., 2001; Amsterdamska et al., 2007), wherein nature and culture are co-constitutively generated, and relieved of their binary distinctions (Alaimo, 2010; Alaimo & Hekman, 2008). The porous structures of metal organic frameworks are sites wherein technoscientific actors are gathered into new frameworks of association. I therefore deploy porosity as a critical analytic to examine the synthesis of MOFs, wherein a range of material, technological, and institutional interests are assembled and enacted as promise.
Carbon capture and metal organic frameworks (MOFs). Image by CO2 Emissions ©Carbon Visuals, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
My angle of approach draws upon shared engagements with scholars exploring interactionist ontologies of ‘viscous porosity’ constituting subjects relationally and through dynamic processes of becoming (Clarke, 2019; Tuana, 2008). Metal organic frameworks are co-produced alongside technopolitics organized within the gaps between climate change discourse and mitigation efforts. MOFs embody the promise of climate change mitigation and carbon capture, affixing CO2 and an array of actors and interests within their porous interiors. Porosity is therefore a space of inbetweenness producing forms of mutual entanglement expressed in material form (Peterson, 2021), and through ‘performed porosity’ that makes visible the agential capacities of all actors involved within sites of intervention and intra-action (Chan, 2020; Barad, 2007). These forms and performances are not without frictions, as knowledge production processes are inherently social, political, cultural, historical and material (Shaik Ali, 2025; Tsing, 2004). I therefore situate metal organic frameworks as socio-material interlocutors that embody, translate, and modify frameworks of scientific knowledge production—their structural configurations at molecular levels corresponding with technoscientific actors and institutional configurations newly enrolled and organized in service of their synthetic design.
The promise of porosity is synthesized alongside metal organic frameworks offered as molecular solutions to the planetary problem of climate change. Promise further accompanies and mobilizes the development of new disciplines attending to carbon capture (Raimbault & Joly, 2021; Selin, 2007), including subfields of materials science and chemistry organized around MOFs since their nascency in the mid-1990s, followed by the rise of ‘framework science’ thereafter. Technoscientific work is generative of promises that, accompanied by consolidation of disciplines, warrant solutions to issues categorized as problems through institutional authorization (Joly, 2010; Jasanoff, 1995). These authorizations include ‘explicit promises’ identifying problem-solution couplings, producing knowledge applied to practical matters and societal improvement (Nowotny, 2015).
Climate change and carbon capture are particularly salient issues mobilising the technoscientific promise of MOFs as a solution to problems of greater scale and complexity, that tend to galvanize disciplinary and institutional interests and authorisations. In this problem-solution coupling, promise assembles scientific and technological innovations as material concerns, alongside futurities of technical and epistemic dimensions, and social order (Kreimer, 2021). In so doing, promises become statements generating expectations of future benefits conferred through science and technology (Mülberger & Navarro, 2017; Borup et al., 2007; Brown & Michael, 2003). However, as this paper goes on to show, technoscientific promises falter when tethered to an ever-receding horizon of potentiality while failing to produce viable outcomes and accepted means of achieving these aims. I therefore consider metal organic frameworks as material technologies and discursive regimes of immaterialized promise.
Infinite Promise
Promise gathers an expanding range of technoscientific interests attending to metal organic frameworks. Early scholarship published by pioneering scientists anticipates these ‘promising materials’ for their gas capture and storage capacities enabled ‘through control of the architecture and functionalization of pores’ (Li et al., 1999). This was followed by a proliferation of scholarship celebrating ‘highly promising porous materials’ with myriad potential applications beyond carbon capture and sequestration (Yu et al., 2017: 9675; see also Tao et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2020; Ding et al., 2019). MOFs are recognized as infinitely configurable with “ever-expanding potential in applications’ and ‘endless possibilities’ (Bailmare & Deshmukh, 2021; Zhou & Kitagawa, 2014; Long & Yaghi, 2009). Alongside carbon capture and sequestration, MOFs are expected to convert CO2 into new fuel sources, chemical agents, polymers and material innovations for new applications throughout the domains of renewable energy, drug delivery, biomedical imaging, membranes and thin-film devices, molecular separations, and more.
More than 100,000 MOFs have been developed at the time of this publication, including 75,000 different pore structures facilitating carbon capture and sequestration. MOFs are structured by combining critical minerals (cobalt, lithium, nickel, etc) into nodes connected by organic lignands (chemical compounds) assembled into porous structures wherein sites of chemical reaction facilitate the capture and sequestration of CO2, and a variety of additional guest molecules. The nodes and linkers of MOFs further correspond with institutional structures of laboratories linking theoretical, experimental and computational scientists assembled to synthesize MOFs. These institutional structures generate over one thousand research publications annually, producing new structural configurations and applications generating countless promising research engagements. The promise of porosity is replete throughout, synthesizing infinite applications captured within the infinitesimal pores of MOFs, marking the “material world [as] fluid and porous, and steeped in the immaterial” (Ford, 2020: 19).
Yet, the structural integrity of porosity often collapses when subject to the pressures of infinite promise. Several limitations suggest the ‘viscous porosity’ of promise, occurring when matter demonstrates resistance to changing form, making itself legible as new objects of knowledge and calculation (Tuana, 2008). MOFs commonly target ‘industrial point sources’ including power plants responsible for an estimated 40 percent of total carbon emissions, and the industrial sector responsible for an additional 30 percent of carbon emissions. However, MOFs are subject to instability outside of laboratory settings and simulated environments. They degrade in wet and humid environments including point sources that generate significant amounts of water vapor, and in ambient humidity levels present in all environmental contexts outside theoretical and experimental vacuums.
MOFs designed computationally and experimentally in lab settings are also prone to defects, eluding predictable structures and consistent functionalities. Though often classified as ‘ideal’ or ‘defective’, defects detected in MOFs are increasingly investigated as promising areas for further research and analysis, while “remaining elusive” as …“neither the existence [of the defects] nor their structures are acknowledged” (Fu et al., 2023: 1). The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning further facilitates the synthesis of MOFs, as technologies are relied upon to select and combine metal nodes and linkers simulate in the virtual billion. Yet, these permutations introduce a commensurate accumulation of simulated instabilities and defects, alongside a corresponding inability to gather, catalogue, interpret and analyze the relevant data. The infinitesimal porosities and myriad applications of MOFs are increasingly collapsing beneath the burden of ‘so many promises’ (Audétat, 2015).
Technofixation and the Porosity of Promise
The profusion of metal organic frameworks therefore generates new frameworks for critical inquiry to the promise and porosity of technofixation. They warrant a return to a prescient and enduring body of scholarship developed in response to the rise of petrochemical industries and technofixes thereof, alongside the scientific practices responsible for petrochemical refinement (Weinberg, 1977; Oelschlaeger, 1979). The scientific practices currently relied upon to synthesize MOFs are those previously developed to extract and refine fossil fuels that now produce 1.6 gigatonnes of CO2 annually, primarily through the petrochemical sectors. These processes and porosities further extend the use of materials used throughout societies reliant upon naturally occurring zeolites—porous structures commonly found among sedimentary, volcanic and basaltic rocks capable of absorbing and storing impurities from water and air. The first known zeolite purification system was developed in the Mayan city of Tikal, and essential to the expansion of Culhua-Mexica/Tenochca, Incan, Greek, Roman and several societies throughout Europe, Asia and meso-America. Zeolites accompany an enduring technofixation with the purification and filtration, indicating society itself as porous and subject to myriad infiltrations.
Zeolites were singularly critical to the rise of oil and gas refinement, and the globalization of the petrochemical industry. The synthesis of new zeolites informed the science of MOFs and their promising porosities. Barrer was among the first to synthesize zeolites in the laboratory in search of materials ‘that do not occur naturally…with remarkable gas-absorbing powers’ generated by newly configured porous structures (Barrer, 1948). Widely recognized as the ‘father of zeolite science’, Barrer’s work later informed scientists working at Union Carbide’s Tonawanda Research Laboratory during the 1940s-1950s, attributed for revolutionizing and globalizing the petrochemical industry. Here, the synthesis of 24 porous zeolites anticipated the possibilities of producing, capturing and storing carbon emissions of their own production. Zeolitic synthesis later provided a framework for their molecular offspring developed by Omar Yaghi and his research team at UC Berkeley in the mid-1990s: metal organic frameworks (MOFs) designed to capture, sequester and convert shared frameworks of purification and technoscientific innovation.
The promise of MOFs therefore exceeds the scale and scope of their porous interiors, generating new apertures of inquiry to the co-production of material porosity and immaterial promise. While promise is the epistemic foundation through which the ontological conditions of technoscientific innovation proceeds, their promising forms are often generated through the axiomatic unfurling of solutions to problems of their own creation—the circular tautology of technoscientific promise. This contribution to Platypus draws upon ongoing research to MOFs and pores as sites of technofixation that “seek to fill the great gap in our understanding by using technology to solve social problems…without attempting to modify the underlying problems” (Douthwaite, 1983: 31). The promise and commercial viability of MOFs is reliant upon the uninterrupted and unquestioned production of carbon emissions, wherein innovative solutions gain traction insofar as they leave hegemonic problem-solution couplings intact, thereby excluding alternate problem-solution couplings (Joly, 2010; Jasanoff, 2004). Metal organic frameworks are therefore synthesized with porous structures created to ‘frame’ and manage the complexity, multiplicity and overflow of problems generated by technoscientific advancements without troubling their structural foundations, by rendering technical that which is inherently social, political and porous.
Conclusion
The promise of metal organic frameworks extends the enduring framing of the ‘technofix’ developed alongside the science of porosity and the problem-solution couplings, articulating the global petrochemical industry and the technopolitics of carbon capture. Oelschlaeger’s early work on technofixes argues, “society cannot be reduced to atoms of comprehensibility, since various combinations of atoms lead to emergent properties” (1979: 50). These remarks now trouble the ‘porosity of promise’ suggested by the limited capacities of MOFs to accomplish the lofty goals of reduced atmospheric emissions and climate change mitigation suggested by their atomic configurations and infinite applications. Several variants of MOFs are currently placed throughout power plants and industrial sites to explore their potential viability. Yet, the vast majority of MOFs remain theoretical and experimental in nature, with an infinitesimal fraction of variants resulting in practical and commercial applications for carbon capture and sequestration.
As molecular solutions to the planetary problem of climate change, MOFs join a pantheon of technoscientific innovations revealing the asymmetries of problem-solution couplings, and a ‘pathology’ of promise revealing the ways in which technofixation fails to capture alternative and counter-hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production within their porous structures (Ferpozzi, 2020; Law & Lin 2017). Yet, the promise of porosity continually generates new sites of critical inquiry and collaboration. Alongside the emerging scholars gathered within sites of engagement created by this Platypus series, my work anticipates further explorations of sociomaterial structures wherein technofixation is captured and converted into infinite yet immaterial promise.
Notes
[1] For more information about the series on pores, here is the introduction to the series titled, “Witnessing the Porous World.”
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Misria Shaik Ali.
References
Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, (eds). Material feminisms. Indiana University Press, 2008.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Amsterdamska, Olga, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman. The handbook of science and technology studies. MIT Press, 2008.
Audétat, Marc. “Why so many promises?: The economy of scientific promises and its ambivalences.” In Knowing New Biotechnologies, pp. 29-43. Routledge, 2015.
Bailmare, Deepa B., Sanjay J. Dhoble, and Abhay D. Deshmukh. “Metal organic frameworks and their derived materials for capacity enhancement of supercapacitors: Progress and perspective.” Synthetic Metals 282 (2021): 116945.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.
Barrer, Richard. “Synthesis of a zeolitic mineral with chabazite-like sorptive properties.” Journal of the Chemical Society (1948): 127-132.
Borup, Mads, Nik Brown, Kornelia Konrad, and Harro Van Lente. “The sociology of expectations in science and technology.” Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 18, no. 3-4 (2006): 285-298.
Brown, Nik, and Mike Michael. “A sociology of expectations: Retrospecting prospects and prospecting retrospects.” Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 15, no. 1 (2003): 3-18.
Chan, J. J. “Performing Porosity: Is there some method?.” Performance Research 25, no. 5 (2020): 129-134.
Clarke, Jennifer. “Porosity and protection.” Fieldsights. Theorizing the Contemporary, (2019). https://culanth.org/fieldsights/porosity-and-protectionAvailable from: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/porosity-and-protection?token=ht6B9TmcW_soSwAqhq7lhi-4rwF37mec
Ding, Meili, Robinson W. Flaig, Hai-Long Jiang, and Omar M. Yaghi. “Carbon capture and conversion using metal–organic frameworks and MOF-based materials.” Chemical Society Reviews 48, no. 10 (2019): 2783-2828.
Douthwaite, Jeff. “Commentary: the terrible temptation of the technological fix.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 8, no. 1 (1983): 31-32.
Felt, Ulrike, Rayvon Fouché, Clark A. Miller, and Laurel Smith-Doerr, eds. The handbook of science and technology studies. MIT Press, 2016.
Ferpozzi, Hugo. “Straight outta the tropics: pathological features of techno-scientific promises in neglected tropical disease research.” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 3, no. 1 (2020): 205-226.
Ford, Andrea Lilly. “Purity is not the point: Chemical toxicity, childbearing, and consumer politics as care.” Catalyst 6, no. 1 (2020): 1-21.
Fu, Yao, Yifeng Yao, Alexander C. Forse, Jianhua Li, Kenji Mochizuki, Jeffrey R. Long, Jeffrey A. Reimer, Gaël De Paëpe, and Xueqian Kong. “Solvent-derived defects suppress adsorption in MOF-74.” Nature Communications 14, no. 1 (2023): 2386.
Jasanoff, Sheila. “Procedural choices in regulatory science.” Technology in society 17, no. 3 (1995): 279-293.
Jasanoff, Sheila, Gerald E. Markle,., James C. Peterson. and Trevor Pinch. eds., 2001. Handbook of science and technology studies. Sage publications.
Jasanoff, Sheila. “Ordering knowledge, ordering society.” In States of knowledge, pp. 13-45. Routledge, 2004.
Joly, Pierre-Benoît. “On the economics of techno-scientific promises.” Débordements. Mélanges offerts à Michel Callon (2010): 203-222.
Kreimer, Pablo. “I Promise, Therefore I Am: Science, Knowledge, and Promises in Peripheral Modernity.” Nómadas 55 (2021): 13-27.
Law, J. and Lin, W. (2017) Provincializing STS: Postcoloniality, symmetry, and method. East Asian Science, Technology and Society 11, no. 2, pp. 211–227.
Li, Hailian, Mohamed Eddaoudi, Michael O’Keeffe, and Omar M. Yaghi. “Design and synthesis of an exceptionally stable and highly porous metal-organic framework.” Nature 402, no. 6759 (1999): 276-279.
Long, Jeffrey R., and Omar M. Yaghi. “The pervasive chemistry of metal–organic frameworks.” Chemical Society Reviews 38, no. 5 (2009): 1213-1214.
Mülberger, Annette, and Jaume Navarro. “The promises of science. Historical perspectives.” Centaurus 59, no. 3 (2017): 167-172.
Nowotny, Helga. The cunning of uncertainty. John Wiley & Sons, 2015.
Oelschlaeger, Max. “The myth of the technological fix.” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 1 (1979): 43-53.
Raimbault, Benjamin, and Pierre-Benoît Joly. “The emergence of technoscientific fields and the new political sociology of science.” Community and Identity in Contemporary Technosciences 31 (2021): 85.
Selin, Cynthia. “Expectations and the emergence of nanotechnology.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 32, no. 2 (2007): 196-220.
Shaik Ali, Misria. “Witnessing the Porous World.” Platypus (2025). https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/witnessing-the-porous-world/.
Tao, Y. R., and H. J. Xu. “A critical review on potential applications of Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) in adsorptive carbon capture technologies.” Applied Thermal Engineering 236 (2024): 1-17.
Tsing, Anna, Friction: An ethnography of global connections. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Tuana, Nancy. “Viscous Porosity: On Witnessing Katrina.” Material Feminisms 188 (2008): 188-213.
Weinberg, Alvin M. “Can technology replace social engineering?.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 22, no. 10 (1966): 4-8.
Yu, Jiamei, Lin-Hua Xie, Jian-Rong Li, Yuguang Ma, Jorge M. Seminario, and Perla B. Balbuena. “CO2 capture and separations using MOFs: computational and experimental studies.” Chemical reviews 117, no. 14 (2017): 9674-9754.
Zhang, Xuan, Zhijie Chen, Xinyao Liu, Sylvia L. Hanna, Xingjie Wang, Reza Taheri-Ledari, Ali Maleki, Peng Li, and Omar K. Farha. “A historical overview of the activation and porosity of metal–organic frameworks.” Chemical Society Reviews 49, no. 20 (2020): 7406-7427.
Zhou, Hong-Cai and Susumu Kitagawa. “Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs).” Chemical Society Reviews 43, no. 16 (2014): 5415-5418.
