A little more than a year since the launch of Mississippi State University’s energy club, BCReative Energy has received $250,000 to find solutions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
MSU senior biological engineering major Colby Freeman founded BCReative in September 2020 as a way to give students the opportunity to create projects involving carbon capture and make an impact in renewable energy.
When the XPRIZE Foundation, a California-based nonprofit that leverages the power of competition to initiate innovation and collaboration surrounding climate change and other challenges in society, announced a carbon removal competition earlier this year for student groups across the world, Freeman and his team submitted a proposal demonstrating 1,000 tons of carbon capture and removal from the atmosphere.
“I was ecstatic when I learned that our team had been selected for this prize,” Freeman said. “I think that it is going to be transformative of the environment here at Mississippi State and can really establish us as a university that is leading on the issues of sustainability, renewable energy and specifically carbon capture.”
BCReative produced a proposal involving a version of bioenergy with carbon capture storage by utilizing sustainably sourced biomasses such as agricultural residues and improved force crops.
“That’s what initially captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we put it through this system called ‘gasification’ and that basically yields carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and oxygen from all of the biomass,” Freeman said. “… Our design is from this mixture called ‘syngas.’ We will capture the carbon dioxide, and the carbon monoxide will be turned into carbon dioxide to be captured.”
BCReative was one of 23 groups selected for the XPRIZE carbon removal competition out of 195 submissions across the world. As part of XPRIZE’s larger $100 million competition, XPRIZE allocated $5 million to these student groups, with BCReative receiving $250,000 to fund its proposal.
XPRIZE Vice President of Energy and Climate Marcius Extavour said the goal of this competition is to find solutions on how to fight climate change as not a replacement for reducing carbon emissions but instead cleaning them up. This competition is XPRIZE’s second carbon-related prize, and Extavour said BCReative demonstrated promising objectives with its proposal.
“What’s unique to XPRIZE is we use this crowd source, a highly leveraged tool which we call the incentive prize,” Extavour said. “We say, ‘Alright, we know what the grand challenges are.’ If we can break down the problem into bits and identify the thing that is stuck, sort of the key element and come up with a good reason why it hasn’t already been solved… We say, ‘OK, this is a good candidate for a prize.’”
The student proposal competition is only the first stage in XPRIZE’s $100 million competition, funded by the Musk Foundation. The second and third rounds involve demonstrating working systems of the proposals and ultimately bringing them to fruition.
Extavour said he hopes groups such as BCReative will be able to use the funds received to execute their projects and compete in the next stages of competition while possibly creating new solutions to climate change.
“Can you turn (carbon dioxide) into stuff that’s worth money?” Extavour said. “Because if you can, businesses don’t need to wait for regulation. They don’t need to wait for policy. They can do this on their own.”
Freeman said his group will use the $250,000 to buy all of the necessary equipment to build the proposal and fund a graduate student worker in the lab of Fei Yu at MSU, one of BCReative’s advisers. Freeman said he hopes to receive additional funds in order to be able to reach the goal of 1,000 tons of capture by 2024.
“It basically gets us off the ground and gets us started on the real work of developing our solution further,” Freeman said.
Carbon removal is not something society needs to focus on just over the next few years, Extavour said, but instead will be a decades-long process in order to sustain carbon and bring the cycle “back into balance,” which he said is the scientific way of saying “climate change.”
Extavour said seeing young people such as BCReative working on carbon capture and removal gives him hope for the future and is glad to see schools and universities like MSU, which are not specifically scientifically-driven research institutions, participating in climate solutions.
“We’re just really inspired to see how many young people responded to the call,” Extavour said. “… If we are going to make progress (with climate change), we need more people in the conversation and more people participating in solutions.”
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