Two L&S undergraduates - Patrick Kirk and David Osmalov -- were part of a winning team in a student competition for innovative ideas to counteract climate change.
The team captured the Grand Prize in the Climate Leadership Challenge at Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies’ Earth Day Conference.
Kirk, an undergraduate in philosophy, and Osmalov an undergraduate in Chemistry, and their team won $50,000, a free 12-month lease in the UW Research Park Metro Innovation Center, and a free 3-month membership at the Sector67 community innovation space.
Their team proposed a new way to produce hydrogen from plant sugars in agricultural waste and explored how the technology might be applied in biogas plants, calling their project Cellulose Digesting Biogas Plants for Hydrogen Production (CDBP).
This win is the first time in the three years of the Climate Leadership Team where an undergraduate team has claimed the Grand Prize, and this excellent team of students really deserved the award!
Their project, The Cellulose Digesting Biogas Plants for Hydrogen Production Project (CDBP), proposes an innovative new way to produce hydrogen from plant sugars and we explore how this emerging technology might be used in biogas plants to produce carbon-neutral hydrogen from agricultural waste.
Currently, 95% of the 9 million tons of hydrogen used annually in the US is extracted from fossil fuels through a process that contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Our aim is to eliminate this dirty, centralized hydrogen production by building a network of hydrogen biogas plants. We have succeeded in creating a model for hydrogen biogas plants by utilizing newly discovered synthetic metabolism technology. We are researching and developing this model in order to implement CDBP on farms across America as soon as possible.
Three other projects qualified as exhibiting winners, receiving $2,000 each:
- BioGRASP (Biogas Growth: Regional and Sustainable Partnerships), proposing a collaborative network of biogas installations in western Uganda and beyond. Team members and their academic departments: graduate students Aleia McCord (Nelson Institute), Jeffery Starke (civil and environmental engineering) and Sarah Stefanos (community and environmental sociology/Nelson Institute).
- The BrightWater Initiative, a self-sustaining purification system to reduce deaths from the consumption of contaminated water in developing countries. Team members: undergraduates Brad Lindevig and Josh Zent (both, biomedical engineering), Parikshith Lingampaly (electrical and computer engineering), and Luke Voellinger (business).
- The Refrigerator Aider, an innovative ventilation system to boost the efficiency of domestic refrigerators by 10 percent or more without using additional energy or moving parts. Graduate student Mike Hvasta (nuclear engineering) submitted the idea.
Open to all UW-Madison students, the Climate Leadership Challenge is the biggest university competition of its kind in the country, according to Holloway. It is funded by the Global Stewards Society, a locally based philanthropic group that includes John F. and Mary Cooper; Gary and Ellora Cooper; Christine Cooper; John and Mary K. Noreika; Peter Vogel of Vogel Brothers Building Company; David Beck-Engel of J.H. Findorff & Son; and Scott J. Repert of Superior Health Linens.
- Read the Press Release
- See other press coverage: Capital Times; Badger Herald; UW-Madison News