{"id":21714,"date":"2021-11-11T07:04:49","date_gmt":"2021-11-11T01:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=21714"},"modified":"2021-11-11T07:04:51","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T01:19:51","slug":"uw-team-among-winners-of-musk-foundations-xprize-for-carbon-removal-student-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/uw-team-among-winners-of-musk-foundations-xprize-for-carbon-removal-student-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"UW team among winners of Musk Foundation\u2019s XPRIZE for Carbon Removal Student Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

MADISON \u2014 A team from the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison is one of the top winners in the $5 million XPRIZE for Carbon Removal Student Competition. The contest is kickstarting projects that could mitigate the impacts of climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the air, ground and oceans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UW\u2013Madison team will receive $250,000 \u2014 the largest available award in the student competition \u2014 to fund further work on their plan to take carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, out of the air and seal it away where it can\u2019t contribute to rising global temperatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are really excited about our technology, and it\u2019s cool to be working on something that has the potential of scaling up in a big way and actually have an impact,\u201d says team leader Keerthana Sreenivasan, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prize announced today is part of the larger $100 million XPRIZE for Carbon Removal supported by the Musk Foundation, a nonprofit research foundation established by entrepreneur Elon Musk. The multiyear global competition is designed to fund early-stage carbon removal concepts and encourage teams to \u201cbuild real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level,\u201d Musk says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A gigaton is 1 billion tons. The United Nations says in 2019 alone, global emissions reached the equivalent of 59 gigatons of carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With its new funding, the UW group can develop its project for future rounds of the competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is just the first step. We have great hopes for the next phase of the XPRIZE for Carbon Removal competition,\u201d says Rob Anex, a professor of biological systems engineering who co-advises the team with Bu Wang, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team is developing a two-part system that consists of a direct air capture (DAC) unit that traps carbon dioxide from the air, plus a carbonization component that converts the captured CO2 into limestone particles. It\u2019s an idea Anex and Wang have long discussed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBu and I had been working on the basic concept for a while, and then XPRIZE for Carbon Removal came around, which is really about taking an idea and being able to turn it into an engineering system that works and scale that up,\u201d says Anex. \u201cThen we talked to some of our students, and they decided that they should come up with a team.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Team member Seunghyeon Jung, a graduate student in biological systems engineering, has been focusing on building the team\u2019s lab-scale DAC unit, which relies on specialized materials and a simple chemical reaction to capture CO2 from the atmosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe flow a hydroxide solution over the packing material while blowing air over the surface in a horizontal way,\u201d says Jung. \u201cThe chemical reaction on the surface captures carbon in the form of carbonate ions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From there, the carbonate solution goes into the carbonization component, where it is combined with ash or slag, byproducts of industrial furnaces like those in coal-fired power plants or steel mills. What comes out is a carbonated powder that includes fine limestone and activated silica particles, which can be used in construction to replace cement. A hydroxide byproduct of the limestone-forming step is recycled back into the DAC unit to capture more carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn essence, we\u2019re converting carbon dioxide from the air into carbonate minerals that can be upcycled into construction materials, all under ambient conditions,\u201d says Wang, who holds a patent related to the carbonization part of the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The DAC unit resides in Anex\u2019s lab in the Wisconsin Energy Institute on the UW\u2013Madison campus, while the carbonization component is housed in Wang\u2019s College of Engineering lab, which means shuffling reaction products back and forth between buildings. It won\u2019t always be that way. The plan is to combine the parts, hooking them together to close the loop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the team moves forward in the XPRIZE contest, which runs through Earth Day 2025, members will further refine their system, figure out how to scale it up, and develop a plan for its implementation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n