Richard Robson is a professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, Susumu Kitagawa is a professor at Kyoto University in Japan, and Omar Yaghi is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.
The three laureates worked to create molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow and that can be utilised to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide or store toxic gases.
The academy said some of these materials had a remarkably large surface area - a porous material roughly the same amount as a small sugar cube could contain as much surface area as a large football pitch.
"A small amount of such material can be almost like Hermione's handbag in Harry Potter. It can store huge amounts of gas in a tiny volume," Olof Ramstrom, Member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry said.
The more than a century-old prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the winners share 11 million Swedish crowns ($A1.8 million), as well as the fame of winning arguably the world's most prestigious science award.
Kitagawa told the Nobel media conference that he was deeply honoured by the award.
"My dream is to capture air and separate air to - for instance, in CO2 or oxygen or water or something - and convert this to useful materials using renewable energy," he said on Wednesday.
"Through the development of metal-organic frameworks, the laureates have provided chemists with new opportunities for solving some of the challenges we face," the award-giving body said in a statement.
The chemistry Nobel was the third prize announced in this year's crop of awards, in keeping with tradition, following those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.
Established in the will of Swedish inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace have been awarded since 1901, with a few interruptions mostly due to the world wars.
Nobel was himself a chemist and his developments in that field helped underpin the wealth he amassed from his invention of dynamite in the 19th century.
The economics prize is a later addition funded by the Swedish central bank.
Sometimes overshadowed by more famous laureates in the fields of physics, literature and peace, the chemistry awards have still recognised many influential discoveries such as nuclear fission, DNA sequencing techniques, and yeast.
The 2024 chemistry award went to US scientists David Baker and John Jumper and Briton Demis Hassabis for work on decoding the structure of proteins and creating new ones, yielding advances in areas such as drug development.
The Nobel announcements continue with the literature prize on Thursday.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize on Monday.
The award ceremony will be held December 10, the anniversary of the death of Nobel.
with AP
