Calgary students finalists in global environmental competition
Posted Sep 18, 2018 7:28 am.
Last Updated Sep 18, 2018 7:32 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
CALGARY (660 NEWS) – Two University of Calgary students have been selected for a very exclusive world competition.
Kanika Kapila and Henry Du, who make up team Ecocan, have been chosen to compete as one of the 10 finalists in the Go Green in the City competition, which allows students to present innovative energy management solutions to real-world problems.
Kapila, who has chosen to specialize her chemical engineering degree to focus on the environment, tells 660 NEWS the team is really excited about the opportunity.
“This design is a green initiative so what we’re trying to do is we’re taking in carbon dioxide emissions from…anything industry that emits CO2, and we’re trying design a plan that would convert that into a usable fuel. For our project we picked methanol,” she said.
“Methanol is cleaner than burning gasoline so that was out innovative design. We started and we tried to come up with a commercial number–how to commercialize this plan for if in the future this plan were to be implemented. This is really important to us because we always talk about how to keep the environment green and with Alberta being the oil and gas hub, we were thinking why not? This design will be cool and it will better our environment.”
Kapila and Du were selected from a crop of 23,000 from 3,000 universities.
“I never imagined that we would go this far.”
The duo is now the only Canadian team headed to the global finals in November.
-with files from Kayla Bruch
