LOS ANGELES – One sunny afternoon on the UCLA campus, Professor Gaurav Sant held a large 35-pound block of concrete in his hands. “Looks like cement,” he said. “Looks like concrete, tastes like concrete, behaves like concrete.” 

But the professor of civil and environmental engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering says what makes the huge block unique is how it was made. 


What You Need To Know

  • A UCLA team won $7.5 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE for creating technology that turns carbon into concrete

  • The team is led by UCLA civil and environmental engineering Professor Gaurav Sant who says the idea for the technology started in 2012

  • The team’s process captures carbon dioxide from power plants and other industrial facilities to make cement, reducing the carbon footprint by more than 50% and trapping the greenhouse gas permanently

  • UCLA is the first university to win XPRIZE of any kind

 

“The production of cement, which is the glue in concrete, is really what contributes to nearly 10% of global carbon emissions, so it is a really, really big number,” Sant said. “When we think of this idea of reducing climate change, obviously reducing carbon dioxide is really important.”

Sant, who came from a long line of civil engineers, said he and a team of students and researchers designed technology that captures carbon dioxide from power plants and other industrial facilities to make cement. The technology reduces the carbon footprint by more than 50%, trapping the greenhouse gas permanently. Sant likens this technology to baking cookies in an oven. 

“We really came up with a better Toll House cookie recipe, and we came up with a better convection oven,” he said. “Sort of between the combination of those two things, we created a pathway where instead of infusing just heat into a Toll House cookie, you can infuse carbon dioxide into concrete.”

Sant said the idea started in 2012 when his team started making very small batches of concrete infused with carbon dioxide emissions. However, it wasn’t until they entered the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE competition and did a test run at a coal-fired power plant in Wyoming that they saw their technology on a widespread scale. They made over 330,000 pounds of concrete blocks, he said. As a result, the UCLA team won the grand prize and $7.5 million. It is the only university to win an XPRIZE of any kind.

“There’s luck, and there’s good engineering,” he said. “I think we were fortunate to have access to both of those two key secret sauces, so to speak, to make this come together.” 

 

Sant created a spin-off company, “CarbonBuilt,” to commercialize the technology, which he said will have widespread use. Some concrete blocks are already being used at UCLA, a physical symbol that could inspire the next generation of innovation.

“A bunch of new freshmen who go take a walk and see these things and you know, and they can sort of get a little bit of a sense of the idea of the types of things that they may work on and that they may want to work within their time here,” he said.