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Earth The 2000 Beanies

XPrize In Carbon Removal Goes To Enhanced Rock Weathering 33

Posted by BeauHD from the award-winning dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The XPrize Foundation today announced the winners of its four-year, $100 million XPrize competition in carbon removal. The contest is one of dozens hosted by the foundation in its 20-year effort to encourage technological development. Contestants in the carbon removal XPrize had to demonstrate ways to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or oceans and sequester it sustainably.

Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup developing a sequestration technique called enhanced rock weathering, won the grand prize of $50 million. The company spreads crushed basalt on small farms in India and Africa. The silica-rich volcanic rock improves the quality of the soil for the crops but also helps remove carbon dioxide from the air. It does this by reacting with dissolved CO2 in the soil's water, turning it into bicarbonate ions and preventing it from returning to the atmosphere.

More than a dozen organizations globally are developing enhanced rock weathering approaches at an industrial scale, but Mati's tech-heavy verification and software platform caught the XPrize judges' attention. "On the one hand, they're moving rocks around in trucks—that's not very techy. But when we looked under the hood... what we saw was a very impressive data-collection exercise," says Michael Leitch, XPrize's technical lead for the competition. Here's a list of the runners-up:

- Paris-based NetZero won $15 million for turning agricultural waste into biochar through pyrolysis, a method that locks carbon into a stable, solid form.
- Houston-based Vaulted Deep won $8 million for geologically sequestering carbon-rich organic waste by injecting it deep underground.
- London-based Undo Carbon won $5 million for its enhanced rock weathering approach, spreading silicate minerals to speed up natural carbon removal.

Additionally, Project Hajar and Planetary Technologies each received $1 million honorary XFactor prizes, recognizing their promising work in direct air capture and ocean carbon removal, despite not meeting the competition's 1,000-tonne removal threshold.
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XPrize In Carbon Removal Goes To Enhanced Rock Weathering More

XPrize In Carbon Removal Goes To Enhanced Rock Weathering

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  • Here's a list of the runners-up:

    - Paris-based NetZero won $15 million for turning agricultural waste into biochar through pyrolysis

    "NetZero"? I haven't heard that name since the dial-up era.

  • People often say we need to reduce our population to reduce our footprint, and commonly primarily cite as evidence our need to eat, and the impact of modern agriculture. But there exists a field known as regenerative agriculture [nrdc.org], which is what it sounds like: making agriculture improve the soil rather than depleting it, and making it build soil rather than causing it to blow and/or wash away.

    Turning situations where our impact is negative into the opposite rather than only trying to mitigate harm is the onl

  • This somewhat compensates for all that additional drilling done by Trump and his supporters. Unfortunately, it is others who pay for that.

  • I'm pretty sure I heard about "enhanced weathering" for carbon sequestration at least a decade ago. I also recall a Dr. Darryl Siemer being an advocate for this, a professor at Idaho State University. This process appears to be a near exact copy of his work. He's advocated for mining basalt as a kind of agricultural fertilizer just like that shown in the fine article.

    I suspect everyone reading this can recall being told to drink milk because the calcium in the milk builds strong bones. Okay, did anyone

    • https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.remineralize.org%2F [remineralize.org]
      "REMINERALIZATION utilizes finely ground rock dust and
      sea-based minerals to restore soils and forests, produce higher yields and more nutritious food, and store carbon in soils to stabilize the climate."

      "We can move from an economics based on scarcity using fossil fuels to an economics of abundance
      through remineralization... "

      "Through our education, outreach, research, and advocacy, Remineralize the Earth facilitates a worldwide movement that brings together gard

    • I'm pretty sure I heard about "enhanced weathering" for carbon sequestration at least a decade ago.

      It was a standard part of my training as a geologist in the mid-1980s, and a somewhat larger part of my modules in "Soil Science" - which as I'm sure you realise, is deeply concerned with how rocks get from being minerals freezing out of molten lava to being nutrient mineral ions in plants - and thence in the animals that eat them. So far, the "enhanced weathering" is just standard weathering, with the additio

  • Conspicuously absent from the list of winners were companies developing direct air capture (DAC) and ocean carbon removal systems. The contest rules stipulated that to win, contestants must remove and store at least 1,000 tonnes of carbon over the course of a year. None of the DAC or ocean carbon removal contestants met that threshold, XPrize’s Leitch says.

    That's an impressive amount of storage for just spreading around crushed rock. I suppose the real question is what the long-term impacts are and it's limitations.

    • Yes, including the environmental costs of mining and transporting said rock.
      • It's only a workable solution in areas where you have reasonably large amounts of basalt (or gabbro - same chemistry, different cooling rate and grain size) in close proximity to agricultural land. And even then, the costs of mining and crushing are not trivial. You really want to reduce the transport element as low as possible.

    • The long term impacts are likely pretty minimal. What plants need that basalt provides is largely calcium. Cattle, pigs, chickens, and humans need calcium and they can get that from plants grown on an industrial scale on modern farms.

      Where do the plants get the calcium? From the dirt. Farmers learned a long time ago that if calcium isn't added to the dirt they grow their crops in then the crops are not as productive, and the animals and humans that eat these crops aren't as healthy either. Where do the

      • Basalt is a carbon sink while limestone is not for reasons of chemistry

        Yes, that's true of literally all chemical compounds.

        and likely other elements that plants crave.

        You're thinking of Brawndo because it has electrolytes.

        If people want lower CO2 in the air then I expect they'd be wiling to pay a bit extra on products to get there.

        No. People want lower CO2 if it's easy and cheap. It's a very abstract concept, so people generally don't care enough to pay more for what is (perceptibly) the same thing.

      • I remember when it was a big deal to buy paper that contained recycled material, the paper had a bit of grey tint to it then the bright white of "virgin" paper. How did that fall out of fashion?

        I have some of that paper here, in A4. Sometimes I print european automotive documentation and that's what it expects, so if you don't want it shrunken when it's already got dinky text, that's what you need. And it's just a lot harder to read the small text on it because of the decreased contrast, so it doesn't actually fulfill its mission. What I want on the rare occasion when I print something is nice bright white paper with a lot of clay in it. Ink also spreads less on it, so if you have to fill out some

        • What I want on the rare occasion when I print something is nice bright white paper with a lot of clay in it.

          That clay will be the "kaolin" I mention to MacMann. It's a clay mineral (one of hundreds ; my mineralogy reference book was by Deer, Howie and Zussmann, each a professor of clay minerals, each with their own different family of eponymous clay minerals ; there are a lot of clay minerals, and a lot of clay mineral names, because they matter!). high grade white stuff goes into the paper industry. Lower

      • What plants need that basalt provides is largely calcium.

        That's one literal element. But it's rarely a limiting nutrient. There's also iron (necessary, but rarely limiting). Sodium and potassium (which basalt is pretty much useless for). Magnesium (the metal ion in chlorophyll ; rather important! ) is an essential nutrient, and can be of patchy availability - soil compaction or slight changes of soil moisture can leave an otherwise uniform field of crops patchy healthy green versus pale green because of ma

  • https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fhtml%2F2501.06623v1

    Puts all those nuclear weapons to good use, albeit with the risk of poisoning the planet with radiation.

  • From the figures in TFS it appears that only $70m of the $100m is accounted for. Where did the rest of the prize money go? Was it sequestered in basalt, perhaps?

  • Will be caused be rock weathering due to an increase in the sun's luminosity approximately 1 billion years from now.

    https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.space.com%2Fbillion-years-from-now-oxygen-lack-wipes-out-life-on-earth

    "As our Sun ages, it is becoming more luminous, meaning that in the future Earth will receive more solar energy. This increased energy will affect the surface of the planet, speeding up the weathering of silicate rocks such as basalt and granite. When these rocks weather the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is pulled

  • Carbon capture techs that might actually work this century. People don’t understand the brain-exploding scale of the problem. A little compressor and co2 extraction plant is nice and all, but we’re talking hundreds of gigatons of removal. Literal entire mountain ranges of material. Note the plural. No whizzy tech solution can scale like this. Not this century. But a low tech option like “mine basalt, grind it, and dump it somewhere to absorb c02” might actually work.
  • Also, it would help save electricity--not to use AI, and to also use links instead of search.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      and to also use links instead of search

      And where do these links come from?

      You are probably thinking about bookmarks and favorites instead of searching for stuff you use repeatedly.

  • Why not just plant trees? In fact, forests are growing and trees are spreading due to increasing CO2.

    Plant some trees. Turn those trees a few years into houses, books and furniture. The carbon has been successful 'sequestered'.

    Or just let the trees grow and grow some more soaking up more CO2 as they do. As the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere decreases, the trees will grow less, so it's natural and self-balancing.

  • Too complicated ? All those other methods, you are using energy of some sort creating more carbon / carbon dioxide !

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