IIT Bombay team wins $250k grant from Elon Musk Foundation

The only team in India to bag the million-dollar grant developed a technology that can remove carbon from the atmosphere. 

Students and faculty members at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay have secured a grant worth $250,000 (around INR 1.85 core) from the XPRIZE Foundation, which is a part of the Elon Musk Foundation at the COP26 summit in Glasgow.  

The student team, also known as SASIITB, consists of Srinath Iyer, Anwesha Banerjee, Srishti Bhamare and Shubham Kumar. They won in the category called “Student Carbon Removal Demonstrations”. As many as 195 teams from 31 educational institutions participated in this category.. The winning team created a tri-modular technology that can capture carbon dioxide from point sources of emission and transforming them into salts. It is the only team from India to win the award. 

The winning team will utilise the grant to compete in subsequent rounds of XPRIZE Carbon Removal or to develop key supporting technologies which will enable carbon dioxide removal. Awards of $250,000 have been given to teams competing for the XPRIZE Carbon Removal Milestone and Grand Prize awards across the various carbon removal pathways – air, land, rocks and oceans, as per the XPRIZE Foundation release. 

Factors such as technologies and/or methodologies used for improving the standards of assessment, precision and time required for carbon measurements were considered. At least 50 per cent of the members of the participating teams need to enrolled in an educational institution in order to be eligible for the Carbon Removal Student Competition. 

Tesla and SpaceX Founder and CEO Elon Musk said, “We want to make a truly meaningful impact. Carbon negativity, not neutrality. The ultimate goal is scalable carbon extraction technologies that are measured based on the ‘fully considered cost per ton’ which includes the environmental impact. This is not a theoretical competition; we want teams that will build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level. What it takes. Time is of the essence.” 

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