IIT Bombay team wins million dollar grant to develop tech to reduce CO2 emission

By Online Desk

A new bit of technology developed by the researchers and professors of IIT Bombay may soon solve the carbon issue and save the environment. To develop the same, they have also won a million-dollar grant.

According to a report, four students and two teachers from IIT Bombay have won a grant of USD $250,000 for the new-age technology at the Sustainable Innovation Forum at COP26 in Glasgow. The grant has come from XPRIZE Foundation in collaboration with Elon Musk Foundation. XPRIZE is the global leader in designing and implementing innovative competition models to solve the world’s grandest challenges. It is the only team from India to win this award.

The team, which consists of four students, Srinath Iyer, Anwesha Banerjee, Srushti Bhamare and Shubham Kumarhave created a tri-modular technology that can capture carbon dioxide from point sources of emission and transform them into salts. XPRIZE and the Musk Foundation announced a grant of $100 million in April this year for anyone who can come up with sustainable technology for carbon removal from the atmosphere. Of this $5 million was a student award.

Factors like technologies and/or methodologies used for improving the standards of assessment, precision and time required for carbon measurements were considered. At least 50 per cent of the members of the participating teams need to enroll in an educational institution in order to be eligible for the Carbon Removal Student Competition.

Arnab Dutta, IDPCS, one of the two mentors part of this project told the Hindustan Times that his team has not only tried to capture the carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere but has also turned that into another commercially viable chemical in industries ensuring a financial benefit to them.

Factors like technologies and/or methodologies used for improving the standards of assessment, precision and time required for carbon measurements were considered. At least 50 per cent of the members of the participating teams need to be enrolled in an educational institution in order to be eligible for the Carbon Removal Student Competition.

Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said, “We want to make a truly meaningful impact. Carbon negativity, not neutrality. The ultimate goal is scalable carbon extraction technologies that are measured based on the ‘fully considered cost per ton’ which includes the environmental impact. This is not a theoretical competition; we want teams that will build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level. What it takes. Time is of the essence.”