Sometimes the simplest idea is the winner.
This is certainly the case with the winner of XPrize carbon elimination competitionwhich was announced on Wednesday. Mati carbon Rada with the $ 50 million grand prize for its improved rocky alteration program that locks carbon in soils for thousands of years.
The Musk Foundation has taken out the price. The finalists were Netzero, who produced biochar; Vaulted in depth, which treats and buries the biomass of waste; And cancel carbon, another improved rock alteration startup. Mati also beat the finalists who spanned A range of technologies, from direct air to improve oceanic alkalinity.
“It is really an honor to be selected from the lighting of carbon elimination that participated in this award,” Techcrunch Shantanu Agarwal, founder and CEO of Mati Carbon told Techcrunch.
Mati carbon elimination technology, Alteration of improved rocksis simple. The company blurs the rocks which naturally convert carbon dioxide into stable minerals, increasing their surface to help them absorb carbon faster. Then, rock dust propagates on the agricultural fields where it mineralizes carbon and contributes micronutrients on the ground.
Several different types of rocks work for an improved rock alteration, but Mati uses basalt, a volcanic rock available in a number of regions around the world. There, fine particles are often waste aggregates used in construction.
Logistics is essential for doing an improved rocky alteration work for the elimination of carbon. Mati applies from basalt free of charge to farmer fields. The costs are supported by a mixture of subsidies and sales of carbon elimination. The company plans to hand over 5,000 to 6,000 metric tonnes of carbon elimination credits this year.
Agarwal said Mati was aimed at selling credits for less than $ 100 per metric tonne in the early 2030s. In the longer term, he plans that the price will drop $ 70 at $ 80 per metric ton. To validate credits, the company takes eight samples for three acres of agricultural land. As its database develops and its models improve in precision, Mati expects it requires far fewer samples.
About 200 million small farmers could benefit from the addition of basalt to their fields, Agarwal said. In total, these small farms, generally less than 24 acres, support around 1 billion people.
“It’s about 800 to 900 million acres in agricultural land,” he said. “You deploy this in the elimination of carbon, you get more than a gigaton of moving each year while increasing the revenues of these farmers who are extremely poor.”
After a season, farmers generally obtain 25% productivity in addition to fertilized soils and from 50% to 70% in degraded soils, said Agarwal. The amendment of the soil also improves water retention.
“This material is the difference between having a harvest and not having a harvest. We saw it in Zambia this year. There were farmers who put this in half of the field – and half of the land was like normal – and there was not half normal because everything was dead because there was a drought.”
To reach all these farmers, Agarwal admits that it is unlikely that Mati grow up fairly quickly. Mati therefore plans to give free licenses to its business resources planning platform (EPR) to organizations if these organizations undertake to share at least 50% of the profits with the farmers they serve.
In addition to Zambia, Mati also operates in India and Tanzania. The company plans to add three other countries this year, possibly shaking to develop to encompass a large part of the world South, said Agarwal, a term that refers to developing countries.
Like many other climate technology startups, Mati is recorded as a public service company. But unlike many others, the company is controlled by the Swahili initiative, a 501 non -profit organization (C) (3).
“I want to build a market mechanism and put a non -profit organization on a global scale, which allows a large part of the value to accumulate the farmer,” said Agarwal. “This Xprize will go a lot to push us in this direction.”