For Gaurav Sant, the ocean has long carried deep, personal meaning.
“I grew up near the ocean on the west coast of India in a state called Goa,” said Sant, a civil and environmental engineering professor and the Pritzker Professor of Sustainability at UCLA. “I’ve always had a fascination with the sea.”
But beyond treasured memories, Sant sees in the ocean a future borne out of his past.
The vast expanses of water that circle and dominate the globe hold a key to helping to curb carbon dioxide emissions, which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, account for the majority of global warming caused by humans. By tapping into his engineering background, Sant hopes to use the oceans to help alter the trajectory of climate change.
“Oceans are the largest carbon removal system that we have,” he said. “We came to the conclusion that dealing with climate change at really large scale requires a coupling of an engineer solution with an incredibly large natural system.”
Equatic, which Sant founded as a way to use ocean water to facilitate carbon removal, is just one of the companies developed and nurtured by UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management. As founder and director of ICM, Sant is advancing engineering technologies and companies, each with the sole purpose of mitigating climate change. It is a mission that combines science, innovation and collegiality.
“I built ICM to have an incredible focus, because that’s really where we have depth,” Sant said. “The institute is largely built on people who not only work together but are also friends with each other, because human relationships and the dynamics of human relationships are fundamentally important to success. It doesn’t matter how smart people are; if they do not get along, they will not succeed in their eventual outcomes.”
Born to engineering
As the son and grandson of prominent civil engineers in India, Sant, 42, knew early on that he seemed destined to pursue a career in engineering.
“I was fortunate in that I’ve actually seen the impact of the work by my grandfather and my father,” he said. “I can go to the city of Pune, as an example, and City Hall was built by my grandfather. I can go to Goa, and the underpinnings of the state, which now nobody ever thinks about, were built by my father because he used to be the master consultant of the government of Goa. So, very absolute markers of success.”
At 18, Sant left India to study at Purdue University, where he received his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. in civil engineering. He focused on becoming a cement chemist “because civil engineers use a lot of concrete, and cement is the glue that holds concrete together.” As a graduate student, he began to look at industries that release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the implications of those emissions. Then it was off to Switzerland for postdoctoral work at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he dove deeper into processes that emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Concrete, which has been around for thousands of years, is the most widely used human-made product in the world, according to the World Cement Association. The material is made by combining sand, gravel, water and cement powder. Its durability and sustainability make it essential for residential and commercial buildings, roads and water systems.
But cement and its production, it turns out, is responsible for about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the World Economic Forum. The heating process used during the manufacturing of cement results in the release of large amounts of CO2 that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and a wide range of ecological impacts.
“What that means is the cement sector that we cannot live without,” Sant said, “is one of the biggest industrial contributors to climate change.”
Scientific solutions to practical problems
When UCLA invited Sant to join the faculty in 2010 to build one of the first programs focused on decarbonizing the materials of modern construction, it seemed like a natural fit. As he quickly rose through the ranks to full professor, Sant began considering what his next steps would be.
“Engineering involves scientific solutions to practical problems. I asked myself, what role am I going to play in these scientific solutions and practical problems?” he said. “I came to the conclusion that the next 100 years of society’s efforts would be, broadly speaking, directed in two directions: One is the extension of human life and improving its quality. The other is the mitigation of climate change and things that underpin it.”
That led Sant to envision an institute that would shepherd bench-scale engineering technologies and spin them out into precommercial or commercial processes, devices, systems and companies.
He pitched his idea to then-Dean Jayathi Murthy. “I remember her sort of looking at me at one of our first meetings and wondering if I turned into some sort of a delusional candidate,” he recalled.
“Well, he is crazy – but it requires a level of craziness to do this,” Murthy said with a laugh. “If it had been anybody other than Gaurav, I might have said, ‘You couldn’t pull this off.’ He had the right level of imagination and energy to make it happen.”
Murthy, who is now president of Oregon State University, said that while the engineering department was home to several research centers, “I don’t know too many that are on the scale of ICM.
“What Gaurav was trying to do with ICM – and I think he’s been really successful is something entirely practical: taking the fundamental knowledge that academics have and trying to make things happen on a short time scale. It’s not research 30 years away. It’s very practical.”
Sant was determined to create an institute unlike anything at other universities or in the commercial sector: “If you’re just going to build a better mousetrap, what’s the point?
“I was looking to do something that benefited society at large,” he added. “And I was focused on something that, if we succeeded, would have global impact.”
In 2019, ICM was born.
The challenge of concrete
The institute launched its first company, CarbonBuilt Inc., in 2020.
What began as Project CO2Concrete emerged from Sant’s years-long research into a binding agent for concrete with lower carbon emissions. CarbonBuilt’s new, proprietary binder uses hydrated lime that can quickly absorb the carbon dioxide, which is then embedded into the concrete as it hardens. The formula Sant and his team created reduces concrete’s carbon footprint by an average of 70% without compromising performance or cost.
“CarbonBuilt technology operates in multiple plants around the U.S.,” Sant said. “This makes a difference – it tells me that the intellectual work we did was translated into practical impact.”
The groundbreaking technology won the 2021 NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize, a global competition that challenged competitors “to develop breakthrough technologies to convert CO2 emissions into valuable products.” In addition to picking up a prize of $7.5 million, the CarbonBuilt researchers became the first university team to win the prestigious honor.
In 2022, ICM launched its second spinoff, Concrete AI, which uses generative AI to help users create millions of possible mix designs and allows them to find the optimal concrete recipe for any application.
The following year, Equatic, which began as Project SeaChange, joined the ICM company roster. Equatic, Sant said, was born out of failure.
“There was something else that we were working on, and it quickly became very clear to us it was not going to succeed,” he said. “The question turned into: Is there anything useful that could come out of it?”
The technology behind Equatic, he said, is “actually really simple.”
“If you recall any high school chemistry, water is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. You run an electrical current through seawater to break the hydrogen and oxygen apart, and you make an acid and a base,” he said. “To neutralize carbon dioxide, you need a base. You use the base to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and you use hydrogen that you produce as a fuel. And that’s it.”
Running an electrical current through seawater makes it about 100,000 times faster in terms of carbon removal than the natural occurrence in oceans, Sant said, “so you effectively activate and expand the capacity of the oceans just by doing things really fast using electricity.”
In March 2023, Equatic launched pilot facilities in the Port of Los Angeles and in Singapore, the latter in partnership with PUB, Singapore’s National Water Agency. After 14 months of operation, Sant said, “We decommissioned these facilities because we learned what we needed to from them.” Equatic is now building a demonstration-scale facility in Singapore, which will help inform the development of commercial facilities elsewhere in the world.
“Singapore is approximately 100 times larger than what we will have in L.A.,” he said. “The one in Canada will be 25 times bigger than what we would have in Singapore.”
Edward Muller, chairman of the ICM advisory board, has worked alongside Sant on his quest to address climate issues for nearly a decade. The advisory board consists of about 20 directors who, like Muller, come from the energy industry or from the financial and entertainment worlds. It has helped guide and shape Sant’s vision for the institute.
“Gaurav understands that you can’t solve the climate issues by impoverishing people, nor is it realistic to say that people will have to change their standard of living adversely or, in the developing world, will never be able to attain the standard of living of the developed world,” said Muller, who also serves as chairman of Equatic and other ICM companies. “He is simultaneously focused on how the technology will work but also how can it be implemented so that it makes economic sense and will be acceptable in both the developed and the developing world.”
Sant is a man on the move. His mission is enormous – climate change is accelerating, not slowing – and he refuses to take things sitting down. Which may explain why it’s not unusual to see Sant walking down the halls of UCLA’s Boelter Hall, deep in conversation with colleagues.
“I like to do walking meetings,” he explained.
Even while seated in his modest office overlooking the engineering courtyard, he can barely sit still, casually tossing a colorful stress ball while he talks.
In addition to working on technologies involving carbonless cement production and development of a commercial-scale membrane for filtering lithium from brine, Sant and his team are exploring technology to produce steel with much lower carbon impact.
Sant travels 200 or more days a year. He has testified before Congress multiple times about his work in carbon management. His efforts have garnered numerous awards and recognition. Last year, he was named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential climate innovators and to Forbes’ list of 50 sustainability leaders.
Part of his work involves fundraising and finding new partners. ICM and its companies have received support and funding from the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation and the National Science Foundation, as well as industry players like Boeing and Shell and private foundations, such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Grantham Foundation.
Traversing politics
Sant insists he’s undaunted by the views of the current administration, with President Donald Trump labeling climate change a “hoax” and Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s deprioritizing climate research.
“Nothing has changed. I am not drawn into ideology,” Sant said. “Our fight against climate change is slightly flagging because we’re very high on ambition, very high on aspiration, very low on action. And until we change that, nothing’s going to change.”
Still, Sant acknowledges change isn’t guaranteed.
“When we are so inclined, we can do incredible things, but we need immense incentive or disincentive to act,” he said. “Unless we see that massive incentive or massive disincentive, I think political alignment is going to be hard to create.”
He points to COVID. “Effectively overnight, the U.S. government put $2 trillion into the economy,” he said. “In six months, seven months, we made a COVID vaccine for a disease that we had not identified before.”
That’s why his focus, he said, is on building successful technologies that create their own path into the world on their own merits and own successes.
“Rather than trying to deal with political polemics or convincing human beings one at a time, both of which are very difficult problems, you essentially de-abstract a problem into something you can actually work on,” he said.
That means advancing technology that is affordable, scalable and effective. That’s a daunt- ing challenge, but one he is willing to take on.
“If it was easy,” Sant said, “somebody would have already done it.”
