How this Pune chemical engineer is planning to wipe out carbon emissions pumped out from industrial chimneys

All this time in Pune, a research-based start-up, Greenovate Solutions and its founder Ronak Mistry, has been working hard at Bhau Institute of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Leadership, and Venture Center at NCL Innovation Park, to reach the same goals that the government was aspiring to.

India is trying to figure out how CCUS can be brought and executed as well, says Ronak Mistry, a chemical engineer who set up the startup in 2019, a year before he completed his course.

Carbon capture technology works in two ways, direct air capture and point source capture. Greenovate has created a technology that filters the surrounding air, pumps it through a machine that absorbs CO2 and stores the carbon, which can be used to make other products. In case of point source capturing, they focus on industries that have chimney outlets, he says.

Carbon dioxide or CO2 is one of the chief causes of global warming. A characteristic of carbon is that it can remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years and create devastation.

“How can we try to reduce atmospheric carbon? How can we make something out of the captured CO2? In India, CCUS is quite in the pre-adolescent age right now. The global leaders in this field are the UK, followed by the European Union and we see the US also trying to get on to the CCUS baseline. Talking of Asia-Pacific, the Indonesian and the Australian regions have actually done a better job on CCUS,” Mistry mentions.

Globally, there is a sense of urgency to restrict the mean global temperature rise to 2 degree Celsius if not the ideal 1.5 degree Celsius. The world is warmer by 1.1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times and already we see its effect in the form of intensifying cyclones, erratic rain and shocking incidents of floods and forest fires, among others.

“Rather than the 60-ft chimney outlet that gushes out emissions into the air, we have the pipeline going into a carbon capturing machinery. The exhaust gases react with the chemical in there. The CO2 from the gas stream gets absorbed into the chemical and stored up while the rest of the gas passes by,” says Mistry. The captured CO2 can either go into ‘Utilisation’ stage, where it is used to make paint, dyes or even building material like cement, or ‘Storage’ stage, in which it is sequestered in the Earth, in sequestration wells dug deep into the earth.

Mistry was studying chemical engineering at MIT Academy of Engineering in Pune when he participated in a student-level automobile competition. A segment of the competition focused on alternate engine exhaust treatment for a greener vehicle.

“This compelled us to look into the existing systems in place that treat the exhaust,” he says. The journey led to Mistry’s creative attempts to find out efficient techniques for the country with his core chemical engineering concepts. The device that he has created is compact, portable, retrofittable and plug-and-play. “We have tried to encompass the entire carbon capture technology in a 20-feet container. A person simply needs to take the container to an industrial site, create the necessary pipelining connections and it is functional,” says Mistry.

Greenovate’s innovation has started conversations in several industries, though Mistry and his team have to negotiate the minefields of ignorance and greenwashing, among others. “We are frequently shocked that even technical experts of many industries do not have a proper understanding of carbon capture technology,” he says. “It is critical that, if we want to have a paradigm shift in Indian industries about decarbonization, we would firstly need to spread awareness and rightful education,” he adds.