Elon Musk’s foundation awards $50M prize
Indian company Mati Carbon won a $50 million grand prize funded by Elon Musk‘s foundation in a competition for the best technology to capture and remove carbon from the atmosphere, for its solution using crushed rocks on farmers’ fields.
Mati Carbon was among more than 1,300 teams from 88 countries that participated in the four-year XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition funded by Musk, launched in 2021 to encourage the deployment of carbon-removal technologies.
Shantanu Agarwal, CEO of Mati Carbon, believes his company’s relatively low-cost approach could “solve some planetary scale problems” and help small farmers who often bear the brunt of climate change, as extreme weather like drought and floods destroy crops.
The method, called enhanced rock weathering, is fairly straightforward, said Jake Jordan, Mati Carbon’s chief science officer.
When it rains, water and carbon dioxide mix in the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid, which falls on rock and eventually breaks it down into small bits of silica.
The carbonic acid is converted to a mineral called bicarbonate, which cannot re-gas to the atmosphere and eventually is washed into the ocean, where it is stored for about 10,000 years.
Mati Carbon spreads already-crushed basalt rock—plentiful in many parts of the world— on the fields “to speed up something that happens anyway,” Jordan said. The crushed rock also releases nutrients that help regenerate soils and increase productivity.
A further $50 million in prizes went to runners up in the competition. They included NetZero, Vaulted Deep and UNDO Carbon, who were awarded $15 million, $8 million, and $5 million, respectively.
Two awards of $1 million each went to Planetary and Project Hajar, a partnership between Aircapture and 44.01.
“At this critical turning point for our planet, the technologies developed by these winning teams represent hope with a broad range of approaches that are suitable for different geographies and can help the world reach net zero and ultimately reverse climate change,” said Anousheh Ansari, chief executive officer of XPRIZE.
“We cannot stabilize our climate without sustainably and safely extracting carbon from our atmosphere and oceans at large scales.”
This is a developing story and more information will be added soon.
This article includes reporting by The Associated Press.