The $50 million grand prize in the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, backed by billionaire Elon Musk, has gone to Mati Carbon — a nonprofit initiative that is pioneering an enhanced rock-weathering technology in India and Africa.
The XPRIZE program distributed a total of $100 million in prizes and support for competitors over the course of four years. Each of the teams was challenged to remove more than 1,000 net tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during the final year of the competition. Mati Carbon and the runner-up teams all achieved the goal.
Carbon removal is one of the options for addressing the human-caused rise in CO2 levels and the resulting effects on global climate, ranging from rising sea levels and melting glaciers to hotter heat waves, more frequent flooding and other types of extreme weather. Natural vegetation does the best job of converting CO2 into oxygen, but researchers are also turning to technology for an assist.
Mati’s process starts with crushed basaltic rock. The basalt is provided at no cost to smallholder farmers in India, Zambia and Tanzania. When the crushed rock is spread on farmlands, it removes carbon dioxide from the air and also restores vital nutrients to degraded soils. Mati says the process improves crop yields by an average of 20%.
Mati’s chief science officer, Jake Jordan, said in a news release that this type of enhanced rock weathering “can provide a durable pathway to remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with a duration of about 10,000 years.”
“We offer this mode of carbon dioxide removal through a program that is expressly built to benefit a population of farmers who are among the least responsible for and most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” Jordan said.
Mati also makes use of a data platform that measures soil properties and keeps track of how much carbon is removed. That allows Mati to build up carbon removal credits that can be sold on specialized markets. Shopify, Stripe and H&M are counted among Mati’s early carbon credit buyers.
Millions of dollars were awarded to the competition’s runners-up as well. NetZero, a French biochar company operating in Brazil, earned $15 million for a circular model to source and process tropical crop residues. Vaulted Deep, a Texas-based waste management company, won $8 million for storing excess organic waste deep underground. Undo Carbon, operating in Scotland and Canada, won $5 million for its rock-weathering technology.
XFACTOR awards worth $1 million each were paid out to Planetary Technologies, which demonstrated a method for removing carbon through ocean alkalinity enhancement; and Project Hajar, which mineralized CO2 in rock formations in the United Arab Emirates.
During earlier phases of the competition, the program awarded $5 million to student teams and $15 million to teams that conducted early demonstrations of their carbon removal technologies.
XPRIZE Carbon Removal is just one of many incentive prize programs organized by the XPRIZE Foundation, which got its start more than two decades ago with the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight. Iranian-American tech entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari, who helped fund that prize and later went into space herself, is now the foundation’s CEO.
In an XPRIZE news release, Ansari said the carbon removal competition could help foster a “critical new industry.”
“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,” she said. “We cannot stabilize our climate without sustainably and safely extracting carbon from our atmosphere and oceans at large scales.”
