Some influential papers are architectural marvels; this one is a well-made table. Millward and Yaghi measured room-temperature CO2 isotherms up to about 42 bar for nine frameworks spanning the field's structural motifs, and reported that MOF-177 held 33.5 millimoles per gram, roughly 147 weight percent, about nine times the CO2 of an equivalent empty cylinder and comfortably beyond the benchmark zeolites and carbons of the day.
The communication's virtue is comparative discipline. Measuring nine materials under one protocol, in one lab, on one instrument made the numbers actually comparable, something the literature's scattered single-material reports could not offer. The observed correlation, that high-pressure CO2 capacity tracks surface area and pore volume rather than chemical decoration, gave the field its first design rule for storage applications and quietly implied that a different rule would govern low-pressure flue-gas capture, where binding strength, not pore volume, dominates.
Critique is straightforward. These are pure CO2 isotherms at ambient temperature: no nitrogen competition, no water vapor, no cycling, so the results speak to storage and transport scenarios rather than realistic post-combustion capture, a distinction press coverage promptly ignored. Later work showed humid flue gas demolishes the capacity ranking established here, with open-metal-site and amine-functionalized materials overtaking the surface-area champions.
Even with that scope limit, the paper deserves its thousands of citations. It established CO2 as a primary MOF application, set the measurement standard, and its ranking logic, one protocol, many materials, honest axes, remains the model for how sorbent comparisons should be published.