Houston-based Mati Carbon won the global XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, funded by The Musk Foundation. Photo via LinkedIn.

Houston-based Mati Carbon has won the $50 million grand prize in the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, backed by Elon Musk’s charitable organization, The Musk Foundation.

Mati was selected in 2024 as one of 20 global finalists. The company removes carbon through its Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) program that works with agricultural farms in Africa and India.

The 3-year-old startup accelerates the natural process of rock weathering (ERW) by applying pulverized basalt to croplands of partnered smallholder farmers, free of charge. Mati says the farmers it partners with are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

“Winning this XPRIZE competition is an incredible honor and a definitive validation of our research and development, and building out the infrastructure needed to impact millions of farmers while delivering verifiable carbon dioxide removal at a gigaton scale,” Mati Carbon Founder and CEO Shantanu Agarwal, said in a news release. “I couldn’t be prouder, not just of the Mati team, but of our collaborators, research partners and the thousands of smallholder farmers who let us be part of their lives. This XPRIZE recognition will allow us to collaborate with local partners to accelerate the use of enhanced rock weathering across the Global South.”

Mati reports that it plans to use the award to “scale its efforts working with smallholder farmers worldwide.” Apart from the XPRIZE funding, Mati plans to grow its model through the sale of CDR credits. According to the company, it counts Shopify, Stripe, and H&M among its early carbon credit buyers.

“Mati Carbon’s deployments bolster farmers’ livelihoods through improved soil health, reduced agricultural inputs, and increased income at zero cost to them. Mati Carbon’s team has developed a scientifically rigorous approach to monitoring and verification, and excelled across each of XPRIZE’s prize evaluation criteria – operational, sustainability, and cost metrics – giving the XPRIZE judges the highest confidence in Mati Carbon’s solution’s long-term scalability,” the XPRIZE judges wrote.

Houston-based Vaulted Deep took home the second-runner-up prize in the competition and $8 million for its organic waste storage process. The company provides permanent carbon storage by injecting nonhazardous organic waste deep underground. It spun off with $8 million in seed funding from Advantek Waste Management Services in 2023.

"Our approach is grounded in geomechanical injection techniques that have been safely deployed globally for decades by our team and predecessors," Omar Abou-Sayed, co-founder and executive chairman of Vaulted, said in a separate release. "XPRIZE recognized that this is a proven approach—already in use, delivering impact, and built on the kind of reliability the industry needs to scale responsibly."

Launched in 2021, the four-year XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition challenged global innovators to deploy scalable solutions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and oceans. More than 1,300 teams from 88 countries competed. XPRIZE finalists were required to remove at least 1,000 tonnes of CO2 over a one-year demonstration period.

French company NetZero took home the first-runner-up prize of $15 million, and London-based UNDO came in as third-runner-up with a $5 million prize.

Since the announcement of the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has cut climate funding for agencies, projects and research. While the Musk Foundation sponsored the XPRIZE event, it is not affiliated with the California-based organization, according to the Associated Press.

The four companies are among 24 semifinalists in the agency’s Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize program that were chosen to receive a total of $1.2 million for their commercial-scale CO2 removal technology.

DOE doles out funding to 4 Houston tackling carbon dioxide removal tech

seeing less co2

Four Houston companies have received $50,000 each from the U.S. Department of Energy to further develop their carbon dioxide removal technology.

The four companies are among 24 semifinalists in the agency’s Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize program that were chosen to receive a total of $1.2 million for their commercial-scale CO2 removal technology.

The funding comes in the form of the Department of Energy’s purchase of CO2 removal credits.

“The Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Prize is a first-of-a-kind initiative to catalyze the market for high-quality CO2 removal credits, helping jumpstart a critical decarbonization tool,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says in a news release.

The Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize project will provide up to $35 million in cash awards. The 24 semifinalists will be whittled down to as many as 10 finalists that’ll receive up to $3 million each.

The four Houston companies that have been named semifinalists are:

  • Climate Robotics. The company’s mobile platform produces and applies biochar — organic waste material or biomass — to store CO2.
  • Mati Carbon. The companyremoves carbon dioxide and stores it in rocks to boost rice productivity in the U.S.
  • 1PointFive. The company, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, is building facility that will eventually capture up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.
  • Vaulted Deep. The companyundertakes geologic storage of slurried organic waste for permanent removal of CO2.

Granholm says the DOE prize program and the Biden administration are giving the private sector the tools they need to make real contributions to our fight against the climate crisis and deliver real benefits to communities across the nation.”

Three of the companies selected — Vaulted Deep, Mati Carbon, and Climate Robotics — were also recently named finalists in Elon Musk's XPRIZE's four-year global competition is designed to combat climate change with innovative solutions.

Vaulted Deep, Mati Carbon, and Climate Robotics secured finalists spots in XPRIZE's four-year global competition is designed to combat climate change with innovative solutions. Photo via Getty Images

3 Houston clean energy startups advance in Elon Musk-backed cleantech competition

finalists

Twenty promising climatetech companies were selected to advance to the final stage of a global competition backed by Elon Musk's foundation — and three of the finalists hail from Houston.

Vaulted Deep, Mati Carbon, and Climate Robotics secured finalists spots in XPRIZE's four-year global competition is designed to combat climate change with innovative solutions. XPRIZE Carbon Removal will offer $100 million to innovators who are creating solutions that removes carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or the oceans, and then sequester it sustainably.

"For the world to effectively address greenhouse gas emissions, carbon removal is an essential element of the path to Net Zero. There's no way to reverse humanity's impact on the climate without extracting carbon from our atmosphere and oceans," Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE, says in a news release. "We need a range of bold, innovative CDR solutions to manage the vast quantities of CO2 released into our environment and impacting our planet.

"The teams that have been competing for this Prize are all part of building a set of robust and effective solutions and our 20 teams advancing to the final stage of XPRIZE Carbon Removal will have an opportunity to demonstrate their potential to have a significant impact on the climate," Ansari continues.

The finalists — categorized into four sections: air, rocks, oceans, and land — were selected based upon their performance in three key areas: operations, sustainability, and cost. The full list of 20 finalists is available online.

Around 20 Houston-area companies were initially identified by the challenge. Here's a look at the three that are advancing to the finals:

  • Mati, in the Rocks category, durably removes carbon from the atmosphere using basalt based enhanced rock weathering (ERW) in smallholder rice paddy farms. This process, which is being demonstrated in India, removes atmospheric CO2 while adding key nutrients in the soil helping to restore degraded soils to benefit smallholder farmers.
  • Climate Robotics, in the Land category, enables broad-scale agriculture adoption of biochar which builds soil health and removes excess carbon from the atmosphere. The company's mobile technology converts crop residues into durable biochar on the fly and in the field, making the economics work for farmers and our ecosystems.
  • Vaulted Deep, also in the Land category, delivers scalable, permanent, carbon removal by geologically sequestering carbon-filled organic wastes. Their patented slurry sequestration, which involves the geological injection of minimally processed wastes for permanent (10,000+ year) carbon removal.

"This cohort of exceptional teams represents a diversity of innovations and solutions across a range of CDR pathways, and shows the significant progress the industry is making in a short period of time," Nikki Batchelor, executive director of XPRIZE Carbon Removal, says in the release. "Over the past three years, this competition has helped accelerate the pace of technology development for a whole new industry of high-potential solutions aimed at reversing climate change."

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Gold H2 harvests clean hydrogen from depleted California reservoirs in first field trial

breakthrough trial

Houston climatech company Gold H2 completed its first field trial that demonstrates subsurface bio-stimulated hydrogen production, which leverages microbiology and existing infrastructure to produce clean hydrogen.

Gold H2 is a spinoff of another Houston biotech company, Cemvita.

“When we compare our tech to the rest of the stack, I think we blow the competition out of the water," Prabhdeep Singh Sekhon, CEO of Gold H2 Sekhon previously told Energy Capital.

The project represented the first-of-its-kind application of Gold H2’s proprietary biotechnology, which generates hydrogen from depleted oil reservoirs, eliminating the need for new drilling, electrolysis or energy-intensive surface facilities. The Woodlands-based ChampionX LLC served as the oilfield services provider, and the trial was conducted in an oilfield in California’s San Joaquin Basin.

According to the company, Gold H2’s technology could yield up to 250 billion kilograms of low-carbon hydrogen, which is estimated to provide enough clean power to Los Angeles for over 50 years and avoid roughly 1 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

“This field trial is tangible proof. We’ve taken a climate liability and turned it into a scalable, low-cost hydrogen solution,” Sekhon said in a news release. “It’s a new blueprint for decarbonization, built for speed, affordability, and global impact.”

Highlights of the trial include:

  • First-ever demonstration of biologically stimulated hydrogen generation at commercial field scale with unprecedented results of 40 percent H2 in the gas stream.
  • Demonstrated how end-of-life oilfield liabilities can be repurposed into hydrogen-producing assets.
  • The trial achieved 400,000 ppm of hydrogen in produced gases, which, according to the company,y is an “unprecedented concentration for a huff-and-puff style operation and a strong indicator of just how robust the process can perform under real-world conditions.”
  • The field trial marked readiness for commercial deployment with targeted hydrogen production costs below $0.50/kg.

“This breakthrough isn’t just a step forward, it’s a leap toward climate impact at scale,” Jillian Evanko, CEO and president at Chart Industries Inc., Gold H2 investor and advisor, added in the release. “By turning depleted oil fields into clean hydrogen generators, Gold H2 has provided a roadmap to produce low-cost, low-carbon energy using the very infrastructure that powered the last century. This changes the game for how the world can decarbonize heavy industry, power grids, and economies, faster and more affordably than we ever thought possible.”

Rice University spinout lands $500K NSF grant to boost chip sustainability

cooler computing

HEXAspec, a spinout from Rice University's Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was recently awarded a $500,000 National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant.

The team says it will use the funding to continue enhancing semiconductor chips’ thermal conductivity to boost computing power. According to a release from Rice, HEXAspec has developed breakthrough inorganic fillers that allow graphic processing units (GPUs) to use less water and electricity and generate less heat.

The technology has major implications for the future of computing with AI sustainably.

“With the huge scale of investment in new computing infrastructure, the problem of managing the heat produced by these GPUs and semiconductors has grown exponentially. We’re excited to use this award to further our material to meet the needs of existing and emerging industry partners and unlock a new era of computing,” HEXAspec co-founder Tianshu Zhai said in the release.

HEXAspec was founded by Zhai and Chen-Yang Lin, who both participated in the Rice Innovation Fellows program. A third co-founder, Jing Zhang, also worked as a postdoctoral researcher and a research scientist at Rice, according to HEXAspec's website.

The HEXASpec team won the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge in 2024. More recently, it also won this year's Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition during CERAWeek in the TEX-E student track, taking home $25,000.

"The grant from the NSF is a game-changer, accelerating the path to market for this transformative technology," Kyle Judah, executive director of Lilie, added in the release.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.