If you had a million dollars, would you spend it on saving the world from climate change? Well, Elon Musk would – the ambitious XPRIZE will fund Carbon Removal technologies in order to slow down climate changes and Carbfix is in it to win it, taking two Milestone Prizes home to Iceland on Earth Day.

The XPRIZE Carbon Removal aims to reduce human-caused climate change and rebalance the Earth’s carbon cycle. The $100M prize funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation is the most significant incentive prize in history aimed at scaling up carbon capture technologies. ‎The judges filtered through nearly 500 submissions to identify 15 teams that will each receive a $1 Million Milestone Prize this year. The competition will conclude in 2025, where judges will select a $50 Million Grand Prize Winner and three runner-ups that will divide $30 million. As of now, only 15 teams are in the running for the grand prize. Carbfix has won two separate Milestone Prizes in collaboration with its partners Heirloom and Verdox, which will allow the companies to scale up their direct air capture technologies and bind the captured emissions into stone.

“We are immensely honored to receive such a solid recognition in this prestigious and highly competitive incentive program. We’ve already been applying our method of underground CO2 mineralization for 10 years. Presently, we are aiming for significant upscaling of our tried and tested technology, an ambition which will be greatly supported by our XPRIZE success and our excellent partnerships in those projects.” Edda Sif Pind Aradóttir, CEO of Carbfix.

Milestone Prize-winning teams were required to demonstrate CO2 removal at a 1,000 tons per year scale, model costs at the million tons per year scale (megaton), and present a strategy to sustainably reach 1,000 million tons per year scale (gigaton) in the future. Carbfix partnered with Heirloom of San Francisco, CA, and Verdox of Boston, MA, for its two winning submissions.

Fellow rock-lover, Heirloom, captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by accelerating the natural properties of rocks, placing abundant, affordable rocks in an engineered system that maximizes the surface area of the minerals exposed to the atmosphere. This simple, modular system has the lowest peer reviewed cost of any direct air capture system in the world.

Verdox utilizes electrical carbon capture technology to sustainably remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Verdox’s technology uses only electricity as an input and requires no waste heat or water. This significantly reduces energy consumption and cost while eliminating potential negative side effects.

Carbfix provides the company’s decade-long tried and tested safe and permanent underground mineralization technology to sequester the CO2 captured by Heirloom’s and Verdox’s innovative carbon capture technologies. Carbfix is currently sequestering CO2 successfully from the world’s first large-scale direct air capture and removal plant, Orca, which is run in cooperation between Climeworks and Carbfix. Soon there will be three carbon capturing plants in the area and the new industry of capturing carbon directly from the air and binding the emissions safely into stone will be pioneered in Iceland.

XPRIZE