For decades, the dream of capturing carbon from industrial smokestacks has stumbled not on the act of capture, but on the cost of release — the enormous energy required to free CO₂ from the solvents that hold it. Researchers at Central South University have now demonstrated that iron-modified carbon nanofibers can reduce that regeneration energy by 14 percent, a modest-sounding figure that carries outsized significance for the economics of climate technology. In the long effort to make carbon capture viable at industrial scale, this work offers not a final answer, but a clearer map of the chem