On the floor of a cluttered office inside Boelter Hall stands a one-foot-high square block technically known as a Concrete Masonry Unit (CMU), which may one day be exhibited in a museum. CMUs are commonplace on construction sites, but more rarely used as office furniture. Yet this concrete object could be special, says its guardian, Gaurav N. Sant, literally the first block in a green revolution that he believes could save the world.
In conversation with UCLA Magazine, Sant, the Pritzker Professor of Sustainability at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (ICM), reveals how UCLA scientists are developing new technologies and leveraging natural systems to help heal the planet by tackling climate change.
This gray block is among the first prototypes of a new technology that was awarded the NRG Cosia Carbon XPRIZE. But, before we get into that, Gaurav, can you share with us your background in India, which was more hands-on construction than academia?
I am a third-generation civil engineer who grew up in Goa, on the west coast of India. Figuratively, my grandfather built half the city of Pune, while my father built half the state of Goa. I was raised with an awareness about built things and how they can improve our quality of life. After studying in the Midwest [at Purdue University] and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, I was either going to become an academic or go back into real estate in India with my father. It could have gone either way.
So what happened?
While at graduate school, I was swept up in the excitement of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which challenged engineers to find new building methods to reduce greenhouse gases produced during construction. Everyone was talking about the environmental threat from our carbon footprint, but there was little being done about it — particularly in the construction sector. I knew that it would be a heavy lift to find the fixes. But in 2010, after California had passed State Law AB32 [tackling greenhouse gases], I felt UCLA was the right place to make a real-world impact through focused research in science and engineering.
I see the world as an engineer: If we can create and demonstrate provide affordable and accessible solutions to broad problems, society will adopt the solutions — quickly — to resolve seemingly insurmountable challenges.
In 2019, you helped set up the Institute for Carbon Management (ICM) at UCLA, where you are now director, to de-risk and translate new technologies that will catalyze a low-carbon world. develop technologies that will move us into a lower carbon world. It has grown fast: 22 patents and partnerships with the U.S. Department of Energy, Singapore’s Public Utilities and industrial giants such as Boeing. Why is there such a thirst for big thinking from UCLA?
Simply because this is the only way. While the scientific community has developed a broad range of solutions, we have been far less focused on translating that knowledge into real-world, scalable, affordable solutions. The answers to climate change have to be smarter and cheaper than what exists today — otherwise businesses will not be interested. These are prerequisites for large scale industrial adoption, diffusion and deployment of low-carbon solutions, and technology is going to be the lever to mitigate climate change. And we are part of that.
In 2021, the institute became the first university team to win the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, an award worth $7.5 million. Your entry was one of 47 submissions from 38 teams in seven countries, and it was all inspired by seashells. How did that come about?
Having grown up by the seashore, seashells were central to my childhood. And seashells are made of calcium carbonate — nature’s original cementation agent. We were really motivated by the idea of how seashells are “cemented” together. And that started us thinking about new forms of concrete, and whether it could be made with carbon dioxide as an ingredient. This thinking, for which we won the XPRIZE, is now being commercialized by a UCLA/institute spinoff company, CarbonBuilt Inc.
The Romans used concrete to build the Colosseum. It’s the second-most used substance in the world, after water. How can you improve such an ancient recipe to change its production process, to make it cheaper and reduce its carbon footprint?
When we decided to focus on decarbonizing concrete, we aligned on three central tenets: price (lower or parity), performance (parity or better), and functional equivalence — while collapsing the embodied carbon footprint by >50%. These tenets are fundamental to catalyze industrial acceptance, and so we worked hard to realize these outcomes on the laboratory bench, in our pilot plants that eventually produced nearly 200 metric tonnes of CMU, and now in commercial CMU that is being manufactured by CarbonBuilt’s partners. Taken together, this effort was a very good example of what talent, focus and ambitious commitment can deliver.
Beyond concrete, you are working on other solutions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and producing green hydrogen fuel. Tell us more about this seawater electrolysis process that you are working extensively on.
Looking beyond concrete, we were very interested in other approaches that could remove and reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulations. In this quest, we were inspired by the world’s oceans, which year upon year have removed and reduced ~25% of human-linked carbon dioxide emissions. We recognized that by passing an electrical current through seawater — within an industrial facility — by a process known as electrolysis, we could enhance and accelerate the process by which the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Importantly, we could do so while mitigating ocean acidification and while producing green hydrogen — a clean fuel that is expected to power a low-carbon world. This approach that is being demonstrated via pilot plants in Los Angeles and Singapore is now nearing prime time, and we will soon deploy this technology [winner of the Temasek Foundation’s 2021 Liveability Challenge, a 2023 Time Best Invention, and 2023 Popular Science 50 Best Innovations] to remove ~5000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year in Singapore. This unique technology that removes atmospheric carbon dioxide and produces green hydrogen — which is being commercialized by a UCLA (ICM) company, Equatic Inc. — is of great interest to nations, such as Singapore, and industrial leaders, such as Boeing, because it decarbonizes our economies and powers them simultaneously.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere may be as critical as reducing car emissions. Are you hopeful that humanity, and your young child, can still avoid the climate catastrophe threatened by global warming? Some people are very gloomy about the future.
Fortunately, there are many around the world like us who are pioneering new technological solutions from carbon management and climate change mitigation. People display pessimism for one of two reasons: They either think all hope is lost, there is no solution to the massive problems we face, or there are so many impediments to the solution that nothing can be done. I see the world as an engineer: if we can create and demonstrate affordable and accessible solutions to broad problems, society will adopt the solutions — quickly — to resolve seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Where does that worldview come from?
There are many reasons for optimism. Look at how quickly, from the depths of despair, we found a vaccine during COVID-19! Success stories of this manner reinforce my optimism and highlight that given collective will, if we marshal our talents and treasures, we can invent and scale up solutions to address our climate issues. And it is our role as scientists and engineers to make sure that we keep on finding better answers to address our most serious societal challenges together.
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Spring 2024 issue.
