U of T students earn share of Elon Musk’s carbon capture cash

Engineering graduate students Celine Xiao and Shijie Liu and their research team from the University of Toronto just won $ 250,000 for their efforts to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and isolate it using only electricity.

The team that formed E-seeker earlier this year, it says that if scaled up and combined with a renewable energy source, its carbon capture method could contribute to nascent efforts to generate carbon negativity, which means a net reduction in gas emissions. greenhouse effect.

Existing carbon capture processes first isolate CO2 gas in the air by turning it into a solid salt, and then use high temperatures to turn it back into pure CO2 gas, explains PhD student Xiao.

The heat required makes it an expensive way to capture carbon, accounting for about two-thirds of the total cost of energy.

“One of the main objectives of our project is to try to minimize the energy cost of this carbon dioxide release process,” said Xiao.

Instead, E-quester’s work uses an electrochemical process to bypass this step, potentially creating a cost-effective way to recover carbon in a form that can be easily isolated and stored or used as a raw material for other industrial processes.

“The fundamental principles of design have been shown to work, now we just need some funding to combine all the subsystems and experimentally show our design work,” said Liu, a master’s student.

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The funding they won this month comes from the $ 5 million XPRIZE competition for college students, which itself is part of a larger $ 100 million prize for innovative ways to capture and store carbon dioxide endorsed by the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk and their foundation.

Xiao says the team, a cross-lab collaboration led by Professors David Sinton and Ted Sargent, will likely spend a large chunk of their award money on lab equipment and will also have to invest in figuring out the most efficient substance to use to speed up production. process. chemical reaction involved in the process.

Now they are gearing up for the next phase of the open competition, a February deadline for submissions from the first year of the four-year competition that could see up to 15 teams fetch $ 1 million each.

Xiao said there are already a couple hundred teams in the field, and he hopes thousands will end up submitting carbon sequestration projects, which can be nature-based, extract carbon from the atmosphere, oceans or land, or use any other. process with potential. to remove and store large amounts of carbon.

To win the grand prize of $ 50 million (or the $ 30 million that could be shared by up to three teams of finalists), teams must demonstrate a working solution that removes at least 1,000 tons of carbon per year, model their costs at a scale of one million tons a year, and show a way to expand it to billions of tons in the future.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that humanity needs to remove around 10 billion tons of CO2 per year by 2050 to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 C or 2 C, the range in the one that the worst impacts of climate change could be avoided.

While emissions declined in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic slowed economic activity, it has probably recovered in 2021says the International Energy Agency.

The world body estimates that the direct air capture (DAC) plants now in operation capture more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, while the IPCC says that if planetary emissions are to reach net zero by 2050, DAC is expected. must scale up to 85 million tons of CO2 per year by 2030 and around 980 million tons of CO2 per year by 2050.

The world’s largest existing DAC plant, in Iceland, went online in september and it can capture 4,000 tons of CO2 per year for storage in basalt formations.

In addition to Xiao and Liu, the E-quester team includes project mentor and postdoctoral researcher Yi (Sheldon) Xu, as well as PhD candidates Rui Kai (Ray) Miao and Colin O’Brien and associate researcher Christine Gabardo.

Two other teams with a Canadian connection won some of the student award money; one that involves Skyrenu Technologies of the University of Sherbrooke and the Inrs-Water Earth Environment Research Centerand the other students from the University of British Columbia join Takachar (Safi Organics) from Kenya, IISC Bangalore from India and Northeastern University from the United States.