Rajnish Kumar, a faculty member in the chemical engineering department of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), who has bagged the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award in the field of engineering for the year 2022, has been pursuing research on sequestering carbon dioxide (CO2), a process by which carbon is returned to earth. Prof. Kumar has been working on the project for the last three years and his research got him the award.
CO2 is produced when vehicles use fuel. Industries, especially cement, chemical and synthetic fuel production, emit CO2. While design improvement in vehicles reduced the emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxide gases, the challenge is to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, especially from industries, says Prof. Kumar.
In the pre-industrialisation era, CO2 emission was below 300ppm, but in the last 100 years it has gone up to 420ppm and is predicted to go up to 1000ppm by in the future. “The point is whether 1000ppm will result in change in weather conditions or will there be other changes,” he points out.
