IIT Bombay has announced that its students' team has secured a million-dollar prize for the development of technology capable of removing carbon from the atmosphere. Four students and two teachers from IIT Bombay secured a grant of $250,000 for new-age technology at the Sustainable Innovation Forum at COP-26 in Glasgow.
The grant came from the XPRIZE Foundation in collaboration with the Elon Musk Foundation. XPRIZE is the global leader in the design and implementation of innovative competition models to solve the world's greatest challenges.
The team of students –Srinath Iyer (Ph.D. student), Anwesha Banerjee (Ph.D. student), Srushti Bhamare (BTech + MTech student), and Shubham Kumar (Junior-Earth Science research fellow) created tri-modular technology which can capture carbon dioxide from point emission sources and transform them into salts. It is the only Indian team to win this award.
XPRIZE and the Musk Foundation announced a grant of $ 100 million in April of this year for anyone who can come up with sustainable technology for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Of these $5 million was a student price.
To win the award, participants had to establish a working solution at a scale of at least 1000 tonnes removed per year and show a path to accomplish a scale of giga-tons per year in the future.
Arnab Dutta, IDPCS, one of the two mentors' as part of this project stated that his team has not only tried to capture the carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere but has also turned that into another commercially feasible chemical in industries ensuring a financial benefit to them.
"Our suggestion is not only to capture this CO2 emitted by industries, but also transform it into other commercially viable chemicals in industries ensuring them a financial benefit while implementing this unique CO2 management program.", stated Datta.