$50 million prize funded by Musk foundation goes to Indian carbon-capture company

An Indian company that spreads crushed rock on farmers' fields to help draw climate-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been awarded a $50 million grand prize in a global competition funded by Elon Musk's foundation.

Mati Carbon was among more than 1,300 teams from 88 countries that participated in the four-year XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, launched in 2021 to encourage deployment of carbon-removal technologies. Many scientists believe removing carbon is crucial in the fight against global warming, caused by the burning of fossil fuels like gasoline, coal and oil, which release carbon dioxide.

''It's important that we not promote carbon dioxide removal as a replacement for emissions reduction,'' said Michael Leitch, the technical lead for the competition. ''But the race is really on both to dramatically reduce our existing emissions (and) also ... deploy carbon dioxide removal solutions at very, very large scales globally.''

The prize is being awarded at a time when Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency are making steep cuts to federal funding and staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service and other science-based agencies that carry out important climate research. The Trump administration has also moved to roll back myriad environmental regulations, including some that regulate carbon emissions.

While the Musk Foundation sponsored XPRIZE Carbon Removal, which distributed a total of $100 million, it is not formally affiliated with the California-based organization, XPRIZE officials said.

XPRIZE runs other contests to try to solve societal challenges. Executive director Nikki Batchelor said the organization is considering more climate-related competitions addressing such issues as removal of the potent greenhouse gas methane, reforestation and climate adaptation and resilience.

Mati Carbon CEO Shantanu Agarwal believes his company's relatively low-cost approach ''has a potential to really solve some planetary scale problems'' while helping small farmers who often bear the brunt of climate change, as extreme weather events like drought and floods destroy crops.

The method, called enhanced rock weathering, is fairly straightforward, said Jake Jordan, the company's chief science officer: When it rains, water and carbon dioxide mix in the atmosphere, forming acid that breaks down rock. Carbon dioxide is converted to bicarbonate, which eventually is washed to the ocean, where it is stored for about 10,000 years.

Mati Carbon spreads powdered basalt rock — plentiful in many parts of the world — on the fields ''to speed up (rock weathering) that happens anyway,'' Jordan said. The powdered rock also releases nutrients that help rejuvenate soils and increase crop productivity.

Smaller prizes were awarded to several other teams that also successfully removed 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide, a threshold that demonstrates an ability to scale up to remove gigatons in the coming decades.

That included $15 million to runner-up NetZero, which turns crop residues such as coffee husks into biochar, charcoal-like particles that can be used on fields to help store carbon in soils while also improving nutrient and water retention.

Other projects involved storing organic waste deep underground, enhancing oceans' ability to store carbon and removing carbon directly from the air.

Scientists have been exploring the gamut of so-called geoengineering solutions to climate change, from drying the upper atmosphere to pumping minerals into the ocean to absorb carbon.

Rick Spinrad, former administrator at NOAA, called the finalists' solutions ''scientifically extraordinary concepts'' and said the best approach to reducing carbon probably will be a combination of technologies.

Leitch, from XPRIZE, said some solutions that did not win — including direct air and direct ocean capture of carbon dioxide — might have an advantage when deployed on a large scale.

''It takes a lot of time and money to build, so I think time will tell,'' Leitch said.

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