XPRIZE Winner Mati Carbon’s Dual Mission: Helping Farmers and Removing CO2
Mati Carbon is striving to eliminate 100 million metric tons of atmospheric CO2 by 2040 while simultaneously aiding 100 million farmers in the Global South.
The company, currently working with farms in India and planning expansions into Zambia and Tanzania, has recently moved closer to its objective. Mati participated in a four-year global contest challenging teams to develop and demonstrate scalable carbon removal solutions. They were awarded the XPrize Carbon Removal, a $50 million prize intended to help the company expand its operations. The award was announced at the TIME100 Summit on April 23.
Nikki Batchelor, executive director of XPRIZE Carbon Removal, explains that the prize aims to foster new solutions that complement existing climate efforts. She emphasizes the critical need to aggressively reduce emissions, but notes that scientific evidence indicates the necessity of carbon removal as well. The development and refinement of these technologies and solutions are crucial now to ensure their readiness by 2050, when the world must operate at a gigaton scale.
TIME interviewed Shantanu Agarwal, CEO, and Jake Jordan, chief science officer of Mati, regarding the potential of their technology, enhanced rock weathering, to offer a scalable carbon removal method. This approach also aims to improve soil health and provide crucial support to farmers globally.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TIME: What are Mati Carbon’s goals?
Shantanu Agarwal: Mati Carbon is pioneering a revolutionary technology to scale carbon removal to gigaton levels. It enhances climate resilience and empowers up to 100 million smallholder farmers in developing economies through a natural process called enhanced rock weathering.
What is enhanced rock weathering, and how does it contribute to the broader climate fight?
Jake Jordan: Rock weathering is a natural process where rocks break down due to rain and water exposure. We accelerate this by pulverizing volcanic rock and applying it to the fields of our partner smallholder farmers. When this pulverized rock interacts with water and gases, it starts to decompose. With rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the rock primarily interacts with CO2 when wet. This interaction reorganizes the CO2 chemically into bicarbonate, a dissolved form of carbon that remains in the water and eventually drains into rivers, aquifers, or oceans, where it can be stored for thousands of years. This makes it a durable method of carbon dioxide removal.
As an added benefit, the breakdown of rocks releases beneficial minerals and nutrients into the farmers’ fields. This not only provides a climate solution by removing carbon dioxide but also supports vulnerable farmers who are disproportionately affected by climate change yet contribute the least to it. We view this as a significant double benefit.
A key part of the XPrize competition was demonstrating the potential to scale the work to remove gigatons of carbon annually. How will Mati Carbon achieve this?
Agarwal: For Mati Carbon, this involves establishing thousands of “bases,” each serving 5,000 to 10,000 farmers. We aim to replicate these bases globally, reaching millions of farmers. Our XPRIZE demonstration included three fully operational commercial bases in India. XPRIZE representatives assessed one of these bases to understand our operating procedures, farmer support methods, and the resulting impact on farmers. We validated and demonstrated our standard scaling unit, its operation, cost, and replicability worldwide.
How can carbon capture benefit smallholder farmers?
Agarwal: The result is increased productivity for the farmer. We’re observing approximately a 20-25% increase in productivity in well-fertilized soils and a 50-70% increase in degraded soils. This has a significant impact on their incomes through increased productivity, along with the ability to reduce pesticide use. This is transformative for farmers living crop to crop. A 30% to 50% increase in income enables them to pay off debts and invest in irrigation equipment or better seeds, which changes their lives.
What are Mati Carbon’s next steps?
Agarwal: Our company is founded on a farmer-first principle. We structured our company as a nonprofit and chose not to accept equity from venture capital funds. We rely on grants and philanthropy to scale, which has limited our expansion. This XPRIZE provides us with the resources to pursue our full mission of reaching 100 million farmers in the next 15 to 20 years.
What do you want people to learn from your work?
Agarwal: I hope that this prize and our work offer hope and direction. Pathways exist that benefit the planet and small farmers while being economically viable through market-driven mechanisms. Mati Carbon has demonstrated that we can build a viable business with our unique model and technology, competing with the best globally and succeeding. I want to inspire hope in the world, other competitors, companies, and individuals, emphasizing the urgent need to address the problems we face instead of denying them.