Nobel-winning chemicals changing the chemicals industry

Posted: October 30, 2025

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. Not only are MOFs one of the most fascinating frontiers in pure chemicals research right now, they have also already found commercial applications in industries in everything from basic chemical production to pharmaceuticals and other specialty chemicals. Further research promises even more practical applications in the coming years.

What are metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)?

MOFs form when metal ions link organic molecules into a crystalline 3D lattice of regular, repeating large cavities. Those cavities can capture, store and release huge quantities of gases and liquids. What’s more, chemists can fine-tune the size and electrochemical properties of those cavities to selectively capture and release particular molecules and even to catalyze particular reactions—without changing the properties of the MOF itself.

MOFs’ superpower is their extreme porosity. Just one gram of an MOF can have as much surface area as 1.5 soccer fields (that’s about two American football fields). They’re an order of magnitude more porous than the zeolites companies often use for liquid and gas separation.

These unique properties recommend MOFs to applications in gas capture, separation, purification and storage, and as heterogeneous catalysts for reactions involving everything from crude oil, pharmaceuticals and toxic gases. So far, chemists have built over 125,000 MOFs, but there are many more waiting to be explored.

Commercialized industrial MOF applications

Many MOF applications are still in development, but around 50 companies already have commercial interests in MOFs for a variety of industrial applications.

Carbon capture

A large portion of commercial MOF deployment right now is for carbon capture. In 2023, a zinc-based MOF developed by Canadian company Svante, called CALF-20, reportedly removed around a ton of CO2 each day from a Canadian cement plant’s flue gas. BASF has since scaled up the production of CALF-20 to several hundred tons per year. Another company, Nuada, has an MOF carbon-capture system it claims is 90% less expensive than alternative amine-based systems.

Gas separation and storage

The first commercial MOF company, framergy, founded in 2011, now produces multi-ton batches of its AYRSORB F250 MOF, a highly effective adsorbent of both methane and ethane, which it markets to the oil and gas industry.

One of this year’s Nobel winners, Omar Yaghi, co-founded H2MOF in 2021. The company is developing MOFs that store large quantities of hydrogen at ambient temperatures and low pressure. Hydrogen producers will be able to use the technology to deliver hydrogen across long distances without the expense of chilling and pressurizing it—or losing product to evaporation. These features also make the use of hydrogen as fuel for shipping and transportation even more feasible. 

The MOF company, Numat, is already producing hundreds of tons of MOFs each year that purify and store gases for the semiconductor industry, including arsine, phosphine and boron trifluoride. It’s also using MOFs to produce clothing and filters that protect against toxic industrial chemicals and other chemical hazards.

Water extraction and cooling 

Another company founded by Yaghi, WaHa, is developing MOF systems that can take in ambient, dry, polluted air and extract pure water without using energy-intensive high temperatures or purification processes. It intends to manufacture everything from personal units for drinking water to industrial-scale models that can deliver 20,000 liters per day.

Other companies, like AirJoule and Transaera, are using MOFs’ water-capturing power to create low-energy cooling systems that could reduce the energy demands of industrial cooling in facilities like data centers.

MOF applications in development

 Many chemists believe that we’ve only just begun to discover the possible industrial applications of MOFs, and there are active research programs to develop more across the industrial chemicals sector. 

Pharmaceuticals 

MOFs promise to play a variety of roles in the pharmaceutical industry in everything from aiding in drug manufacture to antimicrobial therapeutics in and of themselves. Their unique ability to selectively capture and hold large quantities of specific molecules makes them an ideal drug delivery medium, and their ability to release those molecules in response to pH, enzymes and magnetic fields lets them release drugs precisely where, when and how they’re needed. Moreover, their crystalline structure protects otherwise delicate drugs and encapsulates enzymes to enhance their bioavailability.

Pharmaceutical developers could also use MOFs to more easily analyze drug structures. Researchers have developed techniques that eliminate the need to create single-crystal growth of target molecules before using X-ray analysis. Instead of crystallizing drug molecules themselves, the crystalline structure of the MOF holds the drug molecules in stable, periodic arrangements so that standard single-crystal X-ray diffraction can resolve their structure.

Many MOFs also exhibit antimicrobial properties against bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites and research is underway to uncover how MOFs could themselves be used as therapeutics.

Sensors 

In addition to the pharmaceutical applications above, MOFs could be key components in the next generation of biosensors, in devices like smartwatches, insulin pumps and laboratory diagnostics. Their high selectivity for biomolecules lets manufacturers tune them to glucose, DNA and a whole panoply of different proteins, while their strength and biocompatibility make them perfect for both wearable and implantable devices.

Those same properties give MOFs huge potential as industrial chemical sensors as well. Researchers are developing MOF-based sensors for gases such as ammonia, nitrous oxide, acetone, hydrogen sulfide and others.

Industrial chemical management 

Researchers are also expanding the number of gases that MOFs can capture, separate and store. Research programs are underway for methane, acetylene, ammonia and a variety of light hydrocarbons.

MOFs also show great promise as heterogeneous catalysts in a number of applications. Framergy’s AYRSORB F100 MOF can break down nitrogen oxides continuously under atmospheric conditions, and its AYRSORB T125 can break down VOCs and mimic photosynthesis. Other MOFs have been used for alcohol oxidation and olefin oligomerization and polymerization and companies such as novoMOF are working on even more gas separation applications.

AI and machine learning accelerate MOF discovery 

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of MOF research is the sheer number of possible MOFs and possible applications that researchers have to sort through. The next frontier of research is using machine learning—AI—to speed up that work, much as it has done for protein folding and other domains. Researchers from companies such as Meta, cusp.ai and IBM are working on using machine learning to search for MOFs that can best absorb different gases.

It's only a matter of time before all this research bears fruit. Nobel-winner Yaghi recently told Nature, “By using LLMs and AI tools, we can speed up discovery from years to weeks.”