An interdisciplinary research team at UCLA is recycling carbon dioxide in a novel process to develop sustainable building material.
Carbon Upcycling consists of 13 UCLA faculty members, students and staff from various fields such as engineering, chemistry and public policy. The team works to incorporate carbon dioxide into raw material that can be recycled into sustainable building material, said Gaurav Sant, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and the team leader.
Carbon Upcycling, formed in 2014, entered the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE competition last month.
XPRIZE is a nonprofit organization that designs and manages public competitions intended to encourage technological development that could benefit mankind. The XPRIZE challenges scientists, engineers and other innovators to convert carbon dioxide into valuable products.
The competition is primarily sponsored by NRG, a U.S. power company, and COSIA, a coalition of 13 oil sands producers. Winners will be announced in March 2020 and will receive up to $7.5 million each.
Each entry is a paper submission consisting of a demonstration of what technology it applies to reduce carbon dioxide and how it can be carried out commercially in the real world.
“Entering this competition is an incentive for us to turn a concept demonstrated in our lab into reality,” Sant said.
Traditional cement production is responsible for 5 to 7 percent of humans’ annual carbon emissions, Sant said. The cement produced, once used to make concrete, cannot be easily reused, he added.
“What we want to do is to transform what is viewed as the problem into part of the solution,” Sant said. “This is what ‘carbon upcycling’ means.”
The researchers on the team developed a cycle wherein carbon dioxide can be used to rapidly transform lime into limestone that can react with carbon dioxide, Sant said. Manufacturing facilities can then use the limestone as the raw material for building material in the future.
“It is an approach that closes the loop from manufacturing to the reuse of building material,” Sant said.
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