We are delighted to share that Prof. Arnab Dutta, Prof. Vikram Vishal, and their teams have jointly won The 2023 Global Carbon Removal challenge of the Open Air Collective, USA, held recently in New York. The team included research scholars Somnath Guria, Vaibhav Trivedi, Shubham Kumar, and senior research scientist Dr. Piyali Majumdar. It was a competition for students worldwide to create new processes, approaches, and prototypes that can remove carbon from the land, water, or air. The best approaches were selected for an in-person showcase at New York University in April 2023.
The winning teams developed a novel, low-cost, sustainable, and scalable 'CO2 electrolyzer' that captures carbon dioxide and converts it to industrially valuable products. It delivers a truly carbon-negative pathway for the world's future energy management. Prof. Vishal (Dept. of Earth Sciences) and Prof. Dutta (Dept. of Climate Studies) also recently received a WRCB grant for their project Bioenergy driven CO2 capture and storage (BECCS) which aims to use microalgae to capture CO2 and recycle it into biomass, which in turn could be utilized as a carbon source to produce lipids for the production of bioenergy and other value-added products. Prof. Vikram Vishal and Prof. Arnab Dutta are also co-founders of SINE-incubated UrjanovaC Private Limited. The startup aspires to develop a sustainable, practical, and scalable CO2 mitigation technology that deploys readily available ingredients to capture CO2 and convert it into commercially viable end products. Our heartiest congratulations to the team!