Carbon Dioxide(CO2) has always played the part of a villain in all the science books triggering climate change and the greenhouse effect. But not anymore! An Indian start-up, located in Bangalore is giving all they got into fixing the carbon dioxide and converting it into fuel.

Started in 2015, the $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE challenges the world to reimagine what we can do with carbon dioxide emissions by accelerating the development of technologies that convert CO2 into valuable products. There are three rounds in the competition-

1. Round 1: Teams will choose a track and submit technical and business information about their plan, process, products and technology.
2. Round 2: Teams will demonstrate technologies in a controlled environment.
3. Round 3: Teams will demonstrate technologies under real-world conditions.

The competition is sponsored by NRG Energy and Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance. The XPRIZE seeks to inspire the brightest minds around the globe to control climate change. So far, 10 finalists have been selected. Breathe is one of the finalists. Achieving such feat on an international level is a big deal.

The team Breathe is led by Dr Sebastian Peter from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Science Research(JNCASR). The other two members are professor Umesh Waghmare from the institute and Rakshith Raghavan Belur, 30, an engineer with Airbus Group India. 27 teams were shortlisted from around the world and Breathe made it into final 10.

In this competition, Breathe proposes a new strategy to design promising materials for the efficient and selective conversion of CO2 into methanol. Huge reactors pass purified CO2 from flue gas and pure hydrogen across a range of copper, zinc, aluminium and iron-based catalysts which speed up a variant of the so-called Fischer–Tropsch process, as used in the international space station to combine waste hydrogen and CO2 to produce methane and water. That’s real smart. The process involves photocatalytic water splitting, catalysts reaction, machine learning algorithms and all the high tech machinery.

All the finalists will be given $5 million in prize money. The teams will be given chance to work with large CO2 emissions from real power plants. It will be larger than what they have worked with in laboratories but its only 1% of what power plants produce on a daily basis.

The teams still have a whole year to practice and collect data. The competition is divided into two parts- one focused on coal power plant emissions and the other focused on natural gas power plant emissions. So, five of the teams would be competing based on converting emissions from Wyoming coal-fired power plant. The other five would compete at a gas-fired power plant in Alberta, Canada. Each winning team from the two side will receive a $7.5 million grand prize.

The competition is all about curbing carbon dioxide and its a thumbs-up not for just the teams that got selected but also for the whole planet. Wishing luck to Breathe and all other teams!

Image credits- XPRIZE