As I have been editing this web page I’ve been intrigued to see that two Carleton Geology alumni, Sean McCauley ’89 (with Geology faculty member Dan Maxbauer and biology graduate Ella Milliken ’22) and Mahima Swarup ’10, have formed innovative new companies whose goals are to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere springboarding off existing industrial processes.
Mahima is a founder of Captur Tower in Spain. The company aims to utilize direct air capture integrated with existing cooling towers to harness industrial infrastructure and waste heat to capture and remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere. The CO2 then can be reycycled for use as an industrial feedstock. Mahima’s family has long been in the business of supplying industrial cooling towers in India.
Sean and Dan, founders of Alkali Earth, envision using supply partners to process alkaline minerals that are generated during steel production into aggregate products that can be deployed as gravel road surfaces. The process increases the exposure of reactive minerals in the aggregate to carbon dioxide, leading to conversion to carbonate minerals in the road surface that permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere.
I still have a couple of decade’s worth of alumni to review; if I come across other alumni venturing into this interesting new field I will add them to the story.