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Curbing climate change, from land to sea

For Gaurav Sant, a third-generation civil engineer, humanity has never faced a greater challenge than climate change. With the window to claw back carbon emissions closing fast, Sant and his colleagues are racing against time to turn scientific research into real-world impact.

Image of Gaurav Sant in business attire standing inside a building by the window

As director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, Sant’s research focuses on accelerating the deployment of breakthrough technologies to combat climate change across industrial decarbonization, carbon removals and energy transition. ICM collaborates with industry, philanthropy, government and investors to deliver scalable, cost-effective climate solutions.

“It has become evident that we need urgent, paradigm-shifting, affordability-centered actions to decarbonize our society,” said Sant, the Pritzker Professor of Sustainability and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “And to do that, we have to think much bigger and act fast and intentionally, in a way that society has never seen before.”

That mindset has already led to tangible results. In April 2023, less than two years after creating bench-scale prototypes of the Equatic seawater electrolysis process at UCLA, Sant launched the first pilot operations at the Port of Los Angeles and in Singapore. The process removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while producing green hydrogen.

The technology has been named one of TIME’s best inventions of 2023 and Popular Science’s 50 greatest innovations of 2023. It has also won the 2021 Liveability Challenge and was named a finalist for the Earthshot Prize 2024.

Following the pilot program’s success, Sant’s team is building Equatic 1, the world’s largest ocean-based carbon dioxide-removal plant, in Singapore in partnership with the government of Singapore and the U.S. Department of Energy. The $20 million system, slated to go online this December, will be capable of removing 3,650 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year while producing 105 metric tons of carbon-negative hydrogen. Already spun out into one of ICM’s five startups, Equatic has received support from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Boeing, Temasek Trust and others.    

Equatic’s success was built on learnings from another carbon capture, removal and storage technology-turned company led by Sant: CarbonBuilt, which locks carbon dioxide in concrete. In April 2021, the innovation helped UCLA become the first university-led team to win an XPRIZE — a $7.5 million grand prize.

These achievements help Sant, a 2024 TIME Climate100 Innovator, further his mission to turn scientific discovery into scalable climate solutions — building a cleaner future from land to sea.