This Houston startup just won $50 million from Elon Musk’s XPrize for Carbon Removal

When Elon Musk’s Foundation patronized Million 100 million Express to remove carbonA four-year long competition-mass is expected to win a shiny new gadget to find reliable ways to remove a billion tonnes of CO2. But the winner of the Million 50 million great prize is low -tech: spreading rock dust on small, low -income farms in India, Zambia and Tanzania.

The winning start, is called Math carbonOne of the small groups of companies, who uses “better rock weeding” that uses to capture the CO2 from the air. “We’re trying to accelerate something that happens naturally,” says Jack Jordan, chief science officer at Startup. When it rains, the stones slowly break into the process that catchs CO2 from the environment and turns it into a bike carbonate that can be saved for thousands of years. It can be very fast by crushing the rocks and spreading them to a field.

For farmers, the second benefit is: crushed stones also release nutrients such as calcium and magnesium that can make the soil healthy and increase the production of crops.

In India, for example, where the company operates on rice pads, small holder farmers have seen an increase in plus production by 20 % with the use of crushed stones. Startup handles everything, sources the rocks from local ears and applies the products in the fields combined with local staff. Farmers do not need to pay anything. Founder Shantano Agarwal says, “We do not want them to try or spend money on it.”

For a farming family who have earned 500 1,500 a year, making $ 300 excess from the growing crop yield is a significant change. “It has created this massive powerful economic adoption drivers where we work,” says Jordan, who studied Rock Weathering after a post post post in Yale. Earlier, he worked with a similar start called Lithos, which aims for American farmers. It argues that in the fields in the United States, where fertilizer production has already been improved, it has less incentive to use the cliff season. The poorest farmers in the world are more excited, especially after they saw evidence of how to help from the point of view.

The company is taking mud samples so that it can track the CO2 capture in different areas. Then it will sell carbon credit. This is a cheaper way to deal with the problem directly than direct air arrest, which relies on energy -powered machines. And it can easily scales. Matthew, who is based in Houston, plans to franchise the model in different parts of the world.

Agarwal says, “We believe that there are 100 million small holder farmer families who can directly benefit from the increasing income of high -speed rockweighting, and at the same time provide a solution to land use to remove Gigton carbon.”

Initially, Agarwal says, many people were skeptical that the model of working with small holder farmers was viable. But the express, which goes through a diagnosis cycle by a panel of expert judges, which includes a year of action to prove the real life performance of technology. Now, it will use the Express Funds on a scale.