10 Nov UW team among winners of Musk Foundation’s XPRIZE for Carbon Removal Student Competition
Rob Anex, professor of biological systems engineering, holds a piece of ductwork for a direct air capture (DAC) unit while discussing ideas with team members. Photo by Michael P. King / UW-Madison CALS
A team from the University of Wisconsin–Madison 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.
The UW–Madison team will receive $250,000 — the largest available award in the student competition — 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’t contribute to rising global temperatures.
“We are really excited about our technology, and it’s cool to be working on something that has the potential of scaling up in a big way and actually have an impact,” says team leader Keerthana Sreenivasan, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering.
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 “build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level,” Musk says.