🇮🇪 Tomás Markey

The project

The entry was titled "PM-DAC: A system for removing CO2 from the atmosphere." The reported claim is specific and it is about economics rather than chemistry: the system is presented as reducing the cost of carbon dioxide sequestration.

That is the right target. Direct air capture works; the question has always been the price. Carbon dioxide is present in the atmosphere at roughly four parts in ten thousand, so any machine that captures it must move enormous volumes of air to collect a modest tonnage, and the energy to do that is what sets the bill.

Best Individual, in a field of hundreds

The BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition divides its honours between group and individual projects, and Best Individual is the senior individual prize. Markey took it in January 2025, and the award carried a trip to the World Expo in Japan.

The overall prize that year went to three sisters from Tralee — Ciara, Saoirse and Laoise Murphy, aged 17, 15 and 12 — for ACT, an emergency medical response app. Competing against them were 550 displayed projects, selected from nearly 2,000 submissions; 170 projects won prizes of some kind.

The exhibition

Nearly half of Ireland's secondary schools took part in the 2025 exhibition, which marked the 25th year of BT Ireland's sponsorship. Entries are spread across technology, social and behavioural sciences, chemical, physical and mathematical sciences, biological and ecological sciences, and health and wellbeing.

The event runs for a week and is judged by interview as well as by display. Selected intermediate and senior presenters are invited to the BT Young Scientist Business Bootcamp in March, which covers entrepreneurship and the commercialisation of technology — the route by which several exhibition projects have become companies.

Why cost is the whole argument

Every serious pathway to limiting warming now includes some quantity of carbon removal, because a share of emissions — from aviation, cement, agriculture — is difficult to eliminate at source. The disagreement is over how much removal is affordable and who pays for it.

A design that lowers the cost per tonne therefore changes the size of the role the technology can play, which is why a student project framed around sequestration costs is aimed at the live question rather than the demonstration. What the reporting does not provide is the figure: no cost per tonne, capture rate, material or test data for PM-DAC appears in this record.

Direct air capture also competes for attention with cheaper alternatives such as reforestation and soil carbon, which is precisely why the cost per tonne decides how much of a role it plays. A student project framed around that number is engaging with the argument that determines whether the technology is deployed at scale or remains a demonstration.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the Best Individual award at the 2025 exhibition, the project title and purpose, his school and county, and his year of study and age as reported from the ceremony.

Open: the technical specification and performance of PM-DAC, whether it has been developed, patented or tested outside the exhibition, and what Markey has done since January 2025. No later reporting appears in the sources gathered here.