(DIR) Home
20 FINALISTS ANNOUNCED IN XPRIZE CARBON REMOVAL RACING TO REVERSE
CLIMATE CHANGE
(HTM) Source
----------------------------------------------------------------------
_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: O
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
[email protected]
SOURCE XPRIZE Foundation
______________________________________________________________________
Served by Flask-Gopher/2.2.1