Graphite, the carbon center of your humble #2 pencil, is also an essential component in technologies such as batteries, smartphones, laptops, and industrial power equipment. But now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and Estonia’s National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics have shown a promising way to convert waste carbon pulled from the air into graphite, opening up a potential alternative to mining. For the first time, researchers were able to watch the process in real time inside the corrosive, 500-degree-Celsius molten salts while the system was running. The researchers also found that the basic chemical reaction remained the same even when they changed the materials used for the electrodes and molten salts. Because different materials produce different carbon structures, scientists should be able to tune the process to make valuable carbon products, with an end goal of making battery-grade graphite.