Canadian high school grad hopes to use seawater to slow climate crisis

[July 23, 2021: Rachel Morgan]

Big changes need big ideas and these can come from anywhere — even the lush farmland of West Carleton.

Devinder Sarai is working on one such big idea: his goal is to combat the climate crisis that is threatening our planet.

Sarai’s big idea is called Cequest. In essence, the recent graduate from West Carleton Secondary School wants to build a technology that uses seawater to capture carbon dioxide from the air and ocean; turn it into a mineralized bicarbonate; and sink it back into the oceans where it will be sequestered.

The process has the added benefit of adding alkalinity to the oceans to balance out the acidity that poses a risk to our blue planet. Sarai’s even got a fundraising campaign underway to raise enough money to compete for Elon Musk foundation’s XPrize for Carbon Renewal.

“We’re taking CO2 out of the atmosphere,” he told Capital Current. “What’s special about this project is that it takes CO2 out of the ocean, as well as the atmosphere.”

Sarai, who graduated high school in 2020, is building a prototype of his “carbon sequestration factory.” When operational, he says, one factory could remove 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and ocean a year. That could take care of Canada’s annual contribution to global warming.

According to an assessment by the federal government, Canada alone put 730 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in 2019. And Canada contributes about 1.5 per cent of global emissions.

Sarai is a lover of nature and that led to his interest in the environment.

“It’s beautiful in the morning, pristine. Everything’s really nice,” he said. “But, at the same time, to think that on the other side of the country, and especially in the United States, there are wildfires going on. It’s like hurricane season now. And those are getting worse and worse every year. And flooding around the world, all that is happening while I’m still able to enjoy (the outdoors). I try and put myself in that perspective.”

Sarai’s passion for the environment and his participation in a hackathon set up by The Knowledge Society in Ottawa in April led him to the carbon sequestration project. For the hackathon, Sarai’s team focused on reducing carbon emissions by 10 times. The team got a lot of positive feedback for their work in the hackathon, but he was the only one who wanted to take the idea further.

“I have all the parts set up,” Sarai said. “I have several mentors advising in the field, like sciences, business, and then also in terms of just building things that have never really been built before.”

Sarai is working closely with Richard DeVaul, an innovation consultant who has worked with Apple and Google X, Andrew Blanchard, partner at the investment firm Jacket River, and Ottawa-based Ian Lockhart, a senior director of The Knowledge Society.

Sarai’s prototype will compete for a chunk of the $100 million XPrize pot, the largest such incentive in history. The XPrize for Carbon Renewal is a four-year global competition encouraging student teams, small companies and individuals to find ways to sequester carbon directly from the atmosphere or oceans. XPrize will award up to $5 million U.S. to student teams in the fall of 2021.

“That would go a long way towards actually developing a factory,” Sarai said. “But the second thing, I think … would be the credibility that it gives.”

Even if he doesn’t win the XPrize, a bright future lies ahead for Sarai, who is off to Harvard University in the fall to study computer science. He took a year off school after the pandemic put his scholarship on hold. He said he is looking forward to the people he will meet at Harvard and to be able to push himself past his perceived boundaries.

“It’s such a high concentration of bright minds. You’re surrounded by world-class people,” he said. “Who knows what that network will bring. And just cool conversations. Really cool, inspiring people that will just get you to level up as well.”

As for Cequest, Sarai says he has plans to continue developing his carbon sequestration project.

“Building it out, working with a great team across the world because it’s also a business,” he said. “It’s economically incentivized.”

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