“…That recipe for success is something that can only happen at a few places, one of them being the University of Michigan.”
Stephen Brown
This issue of the newsletter features the Sequestration Squad, a team of University of Michigan (U-M) students which was recently selected the first place winners of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) American-Made Carbon Management Collegiate Competition. We caught up with team member Stephen Brown to find out more about their amazing success story.
What is the Sequestration Squad’s origin story?
The first place I heard about the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Carbon Management Collegiate Competition was the newsletter of the Energy Club at Ross. Tess Antrim-Cashin, who was on the board for Ross Energy Club, forwarded an email to Caroline Chisolm and me, asking us if we wanted to get involved in it.
It seemed really interesting from the top level, and it was something that none of us had explicitly worked on before. Tess has a background in logistics, I have a background in technology, and Caroline has a background in business development. We realized that it was very technical, so we started to reach out to our connections at Ross and SEAS, trying to find someone with more experience in pipelines and that’s where we found our friend Greg Allinson, who was able to help provide a lot of information about the complex technical aspects of managing carbon pipelines, and help round out our team.
What types of challenges did you face?
When we formed that team around February, we started to think about how we would transport such a large amount of carbon. It was challenging because the competition wanted a carbon network to sequester a million tonnes of CO2 annually. When we started to think about that, our minds immediately went “okay, how do we create a large networked grid that pulls carbon from each disparate location and sends it out in a way that makes sense.”
Another challenge was that we needed to minimize the amount of negative externalities from the project. That’s why, even though the phrasing of the project seemed like they were looking for a large model, we gravitated towards trying to be as precise and “light-touch” as possible; we tried to maximize the amount of carbon for the least amount of pipeline.
We leveraged Tess’s logistics background to investigate what could be the shortest path between multiple points, but then we took a step further and said “we don’t need to connect every point to everywhere if we develop a plan that is much more about specifying a location, and minimizing the total amount of pipeline you’re building anywhere.”
We got some helpful feedback when we submitted our midpoint reports to the DOE and the case competition. They wanted more details on what this would actually entail. Was it feasible? How much would it cost? What’s the life cycle analysis? What are the other impacts of the community? That was when we really had to put our heads down for about six weeks to conduct much, much more research on the backend of building out a couple of models and then also writing a ten-page report.
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