Editorial | Make money and save the planet

Whatever happened to Nkrumah Fong and the VT EXACAP model 1?

Earlier this year, Mr Fong, 31, a graduate student in environment management at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, placed second in the university’s Vincent HoSang Venture Competition, for which he earned a few hundred thousand Jamaican dollars.

He might have invested the money in his fledgling company, Consolidated Environment Research Laboratory.

Mr Fong’s pitch in the competition was for the VT EXACAP. “It’s basically a device that captures emissions from the exhaust by absorbing the CO₂ (carbon dioxide), the carbon monoxide and the soot,” he told this newspaper at the time.

According to Mr Fong, he had found a way to “filter the exhaust (and) to put it through an absorption to reduce the carbon dioxide”. There was the added bonus, he claimed, of increasing by up to 30 per cent the fuel efficiency of the vehicle to which his system was fitted.

If Mr Fong was right, his invention, next to the electric vehicle, would be among the most consequential innovations for reducing the more than eight gigatons of greenhouse gases that internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles emit into the atmosphere annually, making them major contributors to global warming and climate change.

Further, he would have pulled off a technological feat (how to practically capture, compress and store CO₂ from vehicles) which so far has eluded researchers, and which many analysts, despite various prototypes, considered unfeasible because of the necessary size of the storage receptacle and the energy level needed for the compressions.

Nonetheless, scientists around the world continue to work on ideas similar or related to Mr Fong’s. For instance, in September, the news site of Texas A&M University reported that three of the university’s scientists were attempting to raise money for research on a system to capture water and CO2 from the exhaust of passenger vehicles for use in urban farms. On an average, an America passenger car emits around 4.6 tonnes of CO2 and over 20,000 litres of water annually.

ENERGISE STUDENTS IN ENGINEERING DISCIPLINES

“We need people concerned about the future to make this happen soon, energise students in petroleum, mechanical, civil, agricultural and other engineering disciplines who can cross boundaries and work in sync,” said Maria Barrufet, one of the researchers on the project.

Which brings us back to Mr Fong’s VT EXACAP and why, if it works, it would be a sensible and potentially rewarding project to pursue; and what might be required to successfully bring such a technology to market. And even if VT EXACAP did not live up to Mr Fong’s billing, there would still be value in his effort at innovation, especially if other researchers and entrepreneurs were encouraged to pursue big ideas to reverse man-made global warming and the existential threat it poses to the Earth.

Of the estimated 59 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent CO2e that reached the atmosphere in 2019, approximately 14 per cent was from vehicles. This has to be massively reduced as part of an overall plan to eliminate greenhouse gases, if we are to have a shot at keeping the rise in the Earth’s temperature, by the end of the century, to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the 1850s.

Clearly, with respect to transportation, the rapid move to non-emitting electric vehicles (EV) is both sensible and inevitable. That transition is already under way. Within a decade, almost every new vehicle sold by a major manufacturer will be an EV.

However, with more than a billion ICE vehicles on today’s roads, it will take time for them to be phased out. In the meantime, further improving technologies for ICE vehicles to burn fossil fuels more efficiently continues. An idea like Mr Fong’s VT EXACAP model 1, if it works and can be brought to market at scale, would not only just add research for the capture and sequestering of CO2, but could be a profitable contribution by a Jamaican scientist and entrepreneur to rescue the Earth.

SUPPORTING RESEARCH

But research and development (R&D) in cutting-edge technology is not usually cheap. So it is not clear if Mr Fong holds to his original position of not seeking investment for his venture. However, this matter of funding start-ups and the R&D to bring products to market transcends Nkrumah Fong’s enterprise. And while there are venture capitalists (including angel investors) who put money into start-ups, there is little history or experience of investing in Jamaican-produced clean technology businesses. Government policy, therefore, should pivot to an aggressive support of investments in domestic clean tech enterprises.

Indeed, capital that helps transition ideas and concepts to workable products should be incentivised, through tax credits and other mechanisms that encourage such efforts, across multiple enterprises.

Additionally, governments and entrepreneurs have to find ways to better work with universities and other institutions in supporting research, including in green technology. Schemes like the Vincent HoSang Venture Competition, and its national spin-off, deserve, and ought to receive, far greater attention. After all, it unearths possibilities like Mr Fong’s VT EXACAP. Two years earlier, this same competition drew attention to Jordon Freeman and Samantha Williams and their natural, degradable and compostable alternative to single-use plastic bags.

There are two observations to be made in this regard. Money can, and is being made globally from green technologies. Jamaica can be part of the bonanza. Intellect and talent, as Jamaicans so often prove, isn't constrained by the size, or the development, of the country. How might that now be applied to R&D and business?