Three Canadian companies win $1-million awards each for carbon removal technology
Three Canadian companies with carbon capture technologies have won $1 million each from entrepreneur Elon Musk's foundation.
The University of British Columbia says in a news release that its spinoff company Carbin Minerals has been awarded a socalled XPrize for technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Carbin Minerals co-founder Bethany Ladd says they've developed research to speed up the regular process of rocks absorbing greenhouse gas from thousands of years to weeks or even days.
The university says another spinoff company called Takachar, which won the student version of the XPrize last year, will receive an additional $1 million this year for its plans to convert crop and forestry waste into fuel or fertilizer.
Planetary, a Dartmouth, N.S.-based firm, says it will use its prize money to scale up its technology for removing and storing carbon in the atmosphere, which also creates renewable fuel and restores some of the damage already caused in ocean ecosystems.
The XPrize was given to 15 companies in several countries on Earth Day in an annual competition to accelerate breakthroughs in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
The prize announcement comes as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns in ever-starker terms of the threat of rising global temperatures, including worsening heat, fires, storms and droughts.
“Even if we stopped CO2 production, that's probably still not enough,” XPRIZE founder and executive chairman Peter Diamandis said in a 2021 chat with Musk posted on the XPRIZE website. “We do need mechanisms for extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere and the oceans that don't exist right now.”
The risk of climate disaster could become “dire” if the trend of higher greenhouse gas concentrations continues alongside human population growth and industrialization, Musk replied.
“It's probably an unwise experiment to run,” Musk said. “Right now, we've only got one planet. Even if 0.1% chance of disaster, why run that risk? It's crazy.”
-with files from AP