Since I’ve now heard about it from 20 or so people, I feel like everyone must know about the Virgin Earth Challenge. But since probably a few people have not heard about it: Virgin Airlines owner Richard Branson is offering a $25 million prize to the team that comes up with the best design for a device that captures CO2 from the atmosphere. It just so happens that I’ve been researching such devices for more than 4 years now, and even built a prototype of a component of such a device as part of my PhD thesis research. So am I going to enter the contest? I’m not sure. It would be a lot of work and I was about ready to move on from carbon capture technology. I will see what the full contest requirements look like when they release them in a few months. Certainly a lot of friends have encouraged me to enter. I like the way Miriam put it: “Yours is the story that all grad students dream about. You toil away thanklessly in the basement for years and then all of a sudden this magical fairy comes down and offers you fame and fortune for all your hard work. You have to enter the contest.” (Or something along those lines.) I have to do it to give hope to the huddled masses of graduate students out there.
But in the mean time, the announcement of the challenge has drawn a lot of media attention to my work. Apparently a web search on atmospheric carbon capture brings up my thesis rather quickly, and I continue to be contacted by reporters almost weekly. This article in National Geographic has a lot of quotes from me. The article fudges a couple of things; it set’s up a false dichotomy between me and the manager of the International Energy Agency’s greenhouse gas research program (he says that capture would be cheaper from power plants and I don’t disagree). But basically the article gives me a soapbox to say a few of the most important things I can about air capture. Which is pretty awesome.