Twelve students from Waterloo Science had the experience of a lifetime participating in a white gold energy competition hosted by King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in Saudi Arabia.
The New White Gold Rush Challenge was a collaborative innovation competition between KFUPM and the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Science, designed to cultivate interdisciplinary problem-solving around emerging global opportunities. The students were challenged to design a method to identify the hydrogen system similar to the way the petroleum system was developed.
Three teams from Waterloo and three teams from KFUPM made it to the final stage of the competition in Saudi Arabia after beating out their classmates in the semi-finals that took place at their home institutions. The final six teams spent a few days working with experts in the field to perfect their presentations before making their final pitches to a panel of distinguished judges.
“This was a great opportunity for Waterloo Science students to understand the many facets of clean energy through an international lens,” Yakymchuk says. “Students interacted with industry representatives, faculty and students, and developed novel strategies for the responsible development of hydrogen energy resources.”
The three Waterloo teams, H2No, NaClean Energy, and Gneiss One, brought their ideas to the table and put up a good fight, but HydroNova from KFUPM narrowly beat out Waterloo’s top team, H2No, for the grand prize. H2No’s idea was to extract natural hydrogen (white gold) from depleted petroleum reservoirs.
“Hydrogen generation happens naturally within petroleum reservoirs through chemical reactions, but those reactions can be accelerated by adding a catalyst to produce enough hydrogen to be economically viable,” said Katrina Hynek, earth and environmental science (EES) student and member of H2No. “The CO2 gas created in a depleted reservoir would be stored, so there are no carbon emissions. Then this hydrogen can be liquified and transported across the world.”