alt Hacker News> ... Got awarded the highest possible grade for no reason other than (badly) following a few procedures and measuring that indeed, their internal surface area was insanely big
It's totally OK to experiment with these things, but wouldn't you then have to worry about these application areas being patented and having to enter into costly licensing deals if you wanted to use them in industry?
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In addition to what condensedcrab and mikeyouse wrote, there is a HUGE gap between a commercially viable, patentable product and a freely accessible paper stating "take copper acetate and benzenetricarboxylic acid, stir at pH so and so and remove the volatiles in vacuum".
The resulting blue crunchy mess is NOWHERE near something on a support material that you throw into a fluidized bed reactor for reaction at elevated temperature for months on end. And that's where the proprietary magic happens.
IANAL, but I suspect that the IP situation is similar to current uses, such as catalytic converters.
New tech and specific applications can be covered for commercialization, but the general "idea" of using MOFs for adsorption is broad enough that you'd probably only get into legal hot water if you tried to introduce a direct competitor to someone in the market.
OP was an intern - the potential commercialization of the tech would be left up to the rest of the team. And "costly" is a very relative term.. Exxon earned like $350 billion in revenue last year with over $30 billion in profit. They'd be happy to invest in cutting edge tech if it simplifies their supply chain or removes some steps or units from their refining process.