How XPrize Winner Mati Carbon Is Tackling Climate Change

Yahoo

23-04-2025

Shoots in the field in spring. Credit - Getty Images—Copyright 2019 Sergey Ryumin
Mati Carbon has an ambitious goal: remove 100 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2040—and help 100 million farmers in the Global South along the way.
The company, which currently operates on farms in India, and is looking to expand to Zambia and Tanzania, just got one step closer to achieving its goal. After competing in a four-year global competition that invited teams to come up with—and show a pathway to scale—a carbon removal solution, Mati was awarded the XPrize Carbon Removal, a $50 million award that will help the company scale its operation, which was announced onstage at the TIME100 Summit on April 23.
'The prize itself is really trying to develop new solutions that can complement other climate solutions,' says Nikki Batchelor, XPRIZE Carbon Removal's executive director. 'So we also always state, first and foremost, that we need to reduce emissions as dramatically as possible… but the science now shows us that we also will need to remove carbon alongside that, [and] we need to be developing and maturing those technologies and solutions now in order to have them ready by 2050 when the world will need to be operating at gigaton scale.'
TIME spoke with Shantanu Agarwal and Jake Jordan, Mati's CEO and chief science officer, about how the technology they use, known as enhanced rock weathering, could provide a scalable carbon removal practice—while improving soil health and providing life changing support for farmers around the world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TIME: What is Mati Carbon aiming to do?
Shantanu Agarwal: Mati Carbon has developed a revolutionary technology to scale gigaton carbon removal that builds climate resilience and provides economic empowerment to potentially more than 100 million smaller farmers in the developing economies of the world using a natural process called enhanced rock weathering.
What is enhanced rock weathering and how does it fit into the broader climate fight?
Jake Jordan: Rock weathering happens on Earth all the time. Rocks break down when rain and water wash over them. So what we're doing is we're pulverizing volcanic rock, we're putting it on the fields of our partnered small holder farmers. When that pulverized rock comes into contact with water and gas, it starts to break down. And unfortunately, the level of CO2 in our atmosphere is ever rising, so a lot of the gas that this rock is in contact with when it gets wet and is being broken down is CO2. When that rock interacts with that water and that CO2 at the same time, the CO2 can actually be reorganized chemically into a dissolved phase of carbon called bicarbonate, which stays in the water in the field and eventually drains into rivers, aquifers or oceans, where it can be stored for millennia. That makes it what we call durable carbon dioxide removal.
And an added bonus—when those rocks break down in the field, they're releasing all of the little goodies and nutrients that are contained in those minerals, and they end up in the farmers field, which is why, not only does our climate solution durably remove carbon dioxide, but it actually [helps] some of the most vulnerable farmers who are the most affected by climate change and the least responsible for it. So we see that as sort of a double win for us.
Part of the X Prize competition involved showing that the work could be scaled to remove gigatons of carbon a year. How would Mati Carbon do this?
Agarwal: For Mati carbon, that means thousands and thousands of locations, which we call 'bases.' Each base is serving five to 10,000 farmers, and we want to replicate these bases across the planet, serving millions and millions of farmers. So as we have showcased in our demonstration to XPRIZE, [there are] three fully commercial bases which we have in India. And they came and diligenced one of those bases to see how the operating procedures were, how we actually serve the farmers, what the farmer effect was. We have validated and showed them [our] standard unit of scaling, how it operates, the cost, and how it can be copied and pasted across the world.
How can carbon capture stand to benefit smallhold farmers?
Agarwal: The net result [is] that the farmer is getting increased productivity. In typical well-fertilized soils, we're seeing about 20-25% in increased productivity for these farmers. And in degraded soils, we're seeing 50-70% increased productivity… So there's a huge impact for them, directly in terms of their incomes by the increased productivity, but also their ability to use less pesticide. That's game changing for these people who are living from crop to crop. Suddenly having 30% or 50% increased income means that they can pay off their debt. They can suddenly get more irrigation equipment, or better seeds. It's life changing.
What comes next for Mati Carbon?
Agarwal: Our company is founded on the basis of [being] farmer-first. And to that extent, we essentially structured our company as a nonprofit, and we chose not to take any equity from venture capital funds. We are essentially dependent on grants and philanthropy to really scale, and that has limited us to not being able to spread out as fast and as much as we would like to. This XPRIZE essentially gives us the wings to dream now… and really run after and achieve the full mission of being able to touch 100 million farmers in the next 15 to 20 years.
What do you hope people will take away from the work you're doing?
Agarwal: I hope this prize and what we're trying to do gives people hope and gives people direction. There are pathways possible, which help the planet and help smaller farmers and are economically viable for market driven mechanisms. I think Mati Carbon has proven that we can build a viable business with our unique business model, with our unique technology, and compete with the best of the best in the world and come out strong. I want to give that hope to the world, hope to other other competitors, other companies, other folks that we really need to solve the problems which are in front of us and can't just be denying them.
Write to Simmone Shah at [e-mail].