An Indian company that propagated rocks in the fields of farmers to help extract carbon dioxide of climate warming from the atmosphere has received a $ 50 million grand prize in a global competition funded by the foundation of Elon Musk.
Mati Carbon was among the more than 1,300 teams from 88 countries that participated in the four -year Xprize carbon elimination competition, launched in 2021 to promote the deployment of carbon recovery technologies. Many scientists believe that eliminating carbon is crucial in the fight against global warming, caused by burning fossil fuels such as gasoline, coal and oil, which release carbon dioxide.
“It is important that we do not promote the elimination of carbon dioxide as a replacement for emission reduction,” said Michael Leitch, the technical leader of the competition. “But the race is really in both to drastically reduce our existing emissions (Y) also … Implement carbon dioxide removal solutions to very large scales worldwide.”
The prize is awarded at a time when MUSK and its government efficiency department are making steep cuts to federal financing and personnel of the Oceanic and Atmospheric National Administration, the National Meteorological Service and other science -based agencies that carry out an important climatic research. The Trump administration has also moved to reverse an innumerable environmental regulations, including some that regulate carbon emissions.
While the Xprize carbon extraction sponsored by the Musk Foundationwhich distributed a total of $ 100 million, is not formally affiliated with the organization based in California, said Xprize officials.
Xprize organizes other competitions to try to solve social challenges. The executive director Nikki Batchelor said that the organization is considering more climate related competitions that address issues such as the elimination of the powerful greenhouse gases methane, reforestation and climatic adaptation and resistance.
The CEO of Mati Carbon, Shantanu Agarwal, believes that the relatively low cost approach of his company “has the potential to really solve some planetary scale problems”, while small farmers who often have the worst part of climate change, since extreme weather events such as droughts and floods destroy crops.
The method, called improved rock weathering, is quite simple, said Jake Jordan, scientific director of the company: when it rains, water and carbon dioxide are mixed in the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid, which falls on the rock and finally breaks it into small pieces of silica. Carbonic acid becomes a mineral called bicarbonate, which cannot be re-re-atmosphere and finally washed to the ocean, where it is stored for about 10,000 years.
Mati Carbon spreads the already narrow basalt rock, abundant in many parts of the world, in the fields “to accelerate something that happens anyway,” Jordan said. The crushed rock also releases nutrients that help regenerate soils and increase productivity.
Smaller awards were awarded in the last year of the competition to several other teams that also successfully eliminated 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide, a threshold that demonstrates the ability to expand to eliminate gigatons in the coming decades.
That included $ 15 million in the second place Netzero, which converts crop residues, such as biochar coffee shells, coal -like particles that can be used in the fields to help store carbon in the soils while improving nutrient and water retention.
Other projects involved storing deep organic waste underground, improving the oceans’ ability to store carbon and eliminate carbon directly from the air.
Scientists have been exploring the range of so -called geo -en -geo -en -climate change to climate change, from drying the Upper atmosphere to pumping ocean minerals To absorb carbon.
Rick Spinrad, former NOAA administrator, described the solutions of the finalists “scientifically extraordinary concepts” and said that the best approach to reduce carbon will probably be a combination of technologies.
Leitch, from Xprize, said that some solutions that they did not win, including direct capture of air and the direct ocean of carbon dioxide, could have an advantage when they are deployed on a large scale.
“You need a lot of time and money to build, so I think time will say it,” Leitch said.
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