The 4-year $100M
competition catalyzed the industry toward game-changing carbon
negative solutions
LOS
ANGELES, May 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/
-- XPRIZE, the world's leader in designing and
operating large-scale incentive competitions to solve humanity's
grand challenges, today announced the 20 finalist teams selected to
compete in the last stage of its XPRIZE Carbon Removal. The
four-year global competition is designed to combat climate change
by rebalancing Earth's carbon cycle, offering $100 million to innovators who can create and
demonstrate solutions that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) directly
from the atmosphere or the oceans and sequester it durably and
sustainably. The prize helped catalyze the growth of an entire new
industry, galvanizing over 1,300 teams to develop new ideas for
carbon dioxide removal (CDR). These 20 finalists represent leading
CDR solutions with the potential to make meaningful contributions
to a diverse, global, sustainable, gigatonne-scale CDR effort.
Excess CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans is the main
driver of climate change, with human-produced CO2 emissions
accounting for roughly two-thirds (71%) of all greenhouse gas
emissions. In addition to dramatic emissions reductions,
sustainable and scalable carbon removal solutions will be needed to
prevent average global temperatures from rising above 1.5°C, and
avoid the risk of extreme heat, abnormal weather patterns, and
stresses on food production and access to water, among other
challenges. Without significant climate interventions, the global
average temperature could increase by 6°C within this century.
"For the world to effectively address greenhouse gas emissions,
carbon removal is an essential element of the path to Net Zero.
There's no way to reverse humanity's impact on the climate without
extracting carbon from our atmosphere and oceans," said
Anousheh Ansari, chief executive
officer, XPRIZE. "We need a range of bold, innovative CDR solutions
to manage the vast quantities of CO2 released into our environment
and impacting our planet. The teams that have been competing for
this Prize are all part of building a set of robust and effective
solutions and our 20 teams advancing to the final stage of XPRIZE
Carbon Removal will have an opportunity to demonstrate their
potential to have a significant impact on the climate."
The finalists were selected based upon their performance in
three key areas: operations, sustainability, and cost. The
finalists demonstrated their ability to execute a substantial
demonstration that approaches the competition's goal of removing
1,000 net tonnes of CO2 in the final year of the competition, and a
viable pathway to reaching megatonne scale in the coming years and
eventually gigatonne scale with an understanding of their
environmental and social impacts.
The 20 finalist teams included below are listed by the
competition's four removal pathway tracks: Air, Rocks, Oceans,
Land, Oceans.
Air, Direct Air Capture (DAC)
1. Airhive – HQ
Location: UK, Demo Location: Canada
Airhive technology provides rapid CO2 removal via a low-cost,
non-toxic metal oxide-based sorbent. Airhive is partnering with CO2
storage provider Exterra, who will react Airhive's air-captured CO2
with mine tailings through their proprietary process.
2. Heirloom – HQ Location: US, Demo Location:
US
Heirloom pioneers a low-cost DAC
technology capable of permanently removing CO2 at a
billion-tonne scale by rapidly accelerating the natural
process of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere, forming limestone
within days.
3. Octavia Carbon – HQ Location:
Kenya, Demo Location: Kenya
Octavia Carbon is the Global South's premier
DAC company, specializing in designing, building, and
deploying highly modular machines that extract CO2 directly from
the atmosphere using advanced DAC
technology.
4.
Project Hajar
(44.01 & Air Capture) – HQ
Locations: Oman and US, Demo
Location: Oman
Project
Hajar, a collaboration between 44.01 and
AirCapture, combines state-of-the-art DAC
technology deployed by AirCapture in
Oman with 44.01's pioneering
CO2 mineralization technology, aiming to turn
captured CO2 into rock.
5. Skyrenu – HQ
Location: Canada, Demo Location:
Canada
Skyrenu
combines a DAC system with a rock carbonation
process to treat asbestos mine tailings in order to lock away
carbon forever.
Rocks
6. Arca – HQ
Location: Canada, Demo Location:
Australia
Arca's
patented technology accelerates carbon mineralization in mine
tailings and waste rock, creating an industrial-scale carbon
dioxide removal solution by activating magnesium silicate minerals
to transform ultramafic mine waste into a massive carbon sink.
7. Lithos – HQ Location US, Demo Location: US
Lithos Carbon accelerates the Earth's natural carbon cycle,
deploying enhanced rock weathering (ERW) in agriculture to
permanently remove CO2 from the air, while improving crop yields
and soil health for farmers, utilizing organic-grade volcanic
basalt dust and state-of-the-art science to measure CO2 removal,
aiming to decarbonize the food system.
8. Mati – HQ Location: US, Demo Location: India
Mati durably removes carbon from the atmosphere using basalt based
enhanced rock weathering (ERW) in smallholder rice paddy farms.
This process removes atmospheric CO2 while adding key nutrients in
the soil helping to restore degraded soils to benefit smallholder
farmers.
9. Silicate – HQ: Ireland,
Demo Location: Ireland
Silicate Carbon utilizes surplus
concrete from the building industry to amend agricultural land,
harnessing natural geochemical processes to permanently remove
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via accelerated mineral
weathering, while also enhancing soil pH, boosting crop
productivity, and reducing reliance on pesticides and
fertilizers.
10. UNDO – HQ Location: UK, Demo Location: UK
With nature-enabled enhanced rock weathering (ERW) technology, UNDO
generates permanent, high-quality carbon removal credits with added
co-benefits to support businesses on their pathway to net zero.
11. Yuanchu – HQ Location: China, Demo Location: China
Yuanchu is a pioneering startup focused on developing disruptive
direct air mineralization (DAM) technology, aimed at removing CO2
from the air and permanently sequestering it into solid carbonated
material on a gigatonne scale, with a cost of less than
$200 per ton of CO2 and stable
mineralization products lasting for 1000 years.
Land
12. Climate Robotics –
HQ Location: US, Demo Location: US
Climate Robotics
enables broad-scale agriculture adoption of biochar which builds
soil health and removes excess carbon from the atmosphere. The
company's mobile technology converts crop residues into durable
biochar on the fly and in the field, making the economics work for
farmers and our ecosystems.
13. Mash Makes – HQ Location: Denmark, Demo Location: India
MASH Makes pioneers pyrolysis and gasification technology, which
converts agricultural waste into carbon-negative energy and biochar
for soil amendment, actively combating carbon emissions
14. Net Zero – HQ Location: France Demo Location:
Brazil
NetZero's mission is to scale up biochar as a climate and
agricultural solution by focusing on the abundant unused crop
residues in the tropics. They leverage its proprietary technology
of mid-size, automated, highly optimized, and easily replicable
pyrolysis plants, and operate an end-to-end model that fosters
local farmer involvement as both suppliers of biomass and clients
of biochar. This thereby streamlines logistics, enhances
traceability, and promotes local buy-in.
15. Takachar – HQ Location: India, Demo Location: Kenya
Takachar utilizes MIT technology to
construct a decentralized internet-of-things-enabled
reactor network, facilitating rapid and profitable scaling of
biochar deployment independent of carbon offset credits. They use
patent-pending, low-cost, and portable hardware. This enables
village-based production of customizable biochar-based fertilizers
from locally available crop residues, ultimately improving farmers'
crop yields by up to 30% and net income by 50%, thereby advancing
climate justice.
16. Vaulted Deep – HQ Location: US, Demo Location: US
Vaulted delivers scalable, permanent, carbon removal by
geologically sequestering carbon-filled organic wastes. Their
patented slurry sequestration, which involves the geological
injection of minimally processed wastes for permanent (10,000+
year) carbon removal.
Oceans
17. Captura – HQ Location: US, Demo
Location: US
Captura provides a scalable, low-cost direct ocean capture (DOC)
carbon removal solution, producing a measurable stream of CO2 for
sequestration, using only seawater and renewable energy, with no
other external additives or by-products produced. DOC requires no
freshwater, has a minimal land footprint and can operate with
intermittent power.
18. Ebb – HQ Location: US, Demo Location: US
Ebb Carbon is pioneering a new
carbon removal solution by enhancing the ocean's natural ability to
safely store CO2. This electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement
method has the potential to be one of the largest scale and lowest
cost approaches to removing excess CO2, while reducing ocean
acidity.
19. Kelp Blue – HQ Location: Netherlands, Demo Location: Namibia
Kelp Blue cultivates giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) in offshore
farms off the coasts of Namibia,
New Zealand, and soon Alaska, utilizing innovative submerged
structures to overcome scaling limits of sheltered water and
benefitting from local nutrient upwelling systems, with the
harvested canopy biomass processed into sustainable agricultural
and packaging products while the remaining biomass naturally
sequesters carbon, supports biodiversity, and provides ecological
benefits.
20. Planetary – HQ Location: Canada, Demo Location: Canada
Planetary leverages ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) to enhance
the ocean's natural carbon removal capabilities, developing global
projects in collaboration with stakeholders and utilizing the ocean
carbon platform (OCP) to qualify alkalinity sources, automate
operations, ensure ocean safety, and measure and monetize carbon
removal.
"This cohort of exceptional teams represents a diversity of
innovations and solutions across a range of CDR pathways, and shows
the significant progress the industry is making in a short period
of time," said Nikki Batchelor,
executive director, XPRIZE Carbon Removal. "Over the past three
years, this competition has helped accelerate the pace of
technology development for a whole new industry of high-potential
solutions aimed at reversing climate change."
Additionally, the judges selected three "XFactor Teams" –
Metalplant, Gigablue, and Alaska Future Ecology Institute – who
will not be advancing in the Finals, but are pursuing exciting and
novel concepts with significant potential impact. XPRIZE also
released a list of the Top 100 teams that represent a new
generation of promising solutions across a range of carbon removal
pathways.
Since the inception of XPRIZE Carbon Removal in 2021, over 1,300
teams from 88 countries have participated across the competition's
four removal pathway tracks. These teams, totaling over 8,400
members, represent various backgrounds including scientists,
engineers, technologists, students, and newcomers.
"When it comes to reaching gigaton-scale removals, it is
imperative for many innovators to be in the mix, each making a
concerted, collaborative push to restore the climate. The XPRIZE
Carbon Removal prize is the catalyst that this industry has been
waiting for to drive innovation," said Ben
Rubin, Executive Director and Co-founder of the Carbon
Business Council and key partner of the Carbon Removal prize. "The
efforts of these teams are helping to supercharge first of their
kind carbon removal pathways. We look forward to the impact that
comes not only from the winning teams, but from the competition
overall."
The final stage of the competition will take place over the next
year, wherein finalist teams are challenged to demonstrate 1,000
net tonnes of CO2 removal and will be judged based on their fully
considered cost, operational performance, and against sustainable
scalability requirements. To date, XPRIZE Carbon Removal awarded
$20M, with $5M distributed to 23 student teams, and
$15M awarded to 15 milestone winners.
The grand prize winner will take home $50M, and $30M will
be distributed amongst runners up chosen by the competition judges
in April 2025.
XPRIZE Carbon Removal builds on XPRIZE's previous work in the
carbon management sector, which includes its NRG COSIA Carbon
XPRIZE that offered $20M to
innovators to develop breakthrough technologies that captured and
converted industrial CO2 emissions into usable products. Awarded in
2021, the competition resulted in winning technologies that
mineralize carbon into concrete to reduce the carbon footprint of
the built environment.
XPRIZE Carbon Removal is funded by the Musk Foundation.
Learn more and get involved at xprize.org/carbonremoval.
About XPRIZE
XPRIZE is an established global leader in designing, launching,
and executing large-scale competitions to solve humanity's greatest
challenges. Our unique model democratizes innovation by
incentivizing crowd-sourced, scientifically viable solutions to
create a more equitable and abundant future for all. Donate, learn
more, or join a team at xprize.org.
About the Musk Foundation
The Musk Foundation creates grants made in support of: renewable
energy research and advocacy; human space exploration research and
advocacy; pediatric research; science and engineering education;
and development of safe artificial intelligence to benefit
humanity.
Contact:
Katy Frame
kframe@brgcommunications.com
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