IIT students device method to reduce polluting CO2 emissions

New Delhi: When world leaders are hosting meetings and discussions to cope up with global warming, energy crisis and depleting resources, a group of students at Indian Institute of Technology here attempt to find a single solution to all the three environment issues.

The project, which in several interesting steps converts the casual agent of one of the problems into a key to solving the other two, will be displayed and demonstrated at the 11^th IIT Open House on April 18 here at the institute.

The alarming concentration of Carbon Dioxide (CO2), one of the main contributors to global warming, has raised the need for minimising generation and sequestration of the gas.

The research group here at IIT Delhi, under the leadership of Anil Verma, has attempted to reduce quantity of pollutant in air but also convert it into several valuable products.

"We are involved in electrochemical conversion of CO2 and found that CO2 can be used to generate methane and other valuable products," Verma, an Associate Professor, Department

of Chemical Engineering at the technology institute says.

The conversion of carbon dioxide into methane has been using renewable sources of energy like sun or wind.

Verma mentions, that conventionally the gas is dissolved into a solvent during conversion. His team, instead captures the gas directly in a reactor where it is converted into methane and other products like formic acid and hydrogen gas.

"We have developed such a reactor in the lab and converted CO2 to methane and some other value added products," Verma, who has been working on this project with the team for nearly

seven years now, says.

This process, he adds, saves both time and money.