The Carbon Removal XPRIZE Announces Their 20 Finalists

The XPRIZE remains one of the top stories in carbon removal and one of the largest funding sources for CDR start-ups. The Elon Musk-backed competition will award $50 million to the winning CDR startup in 2025 and send $10 million to three other runner-up teams. Over 1000 teams worldwide have applied since the award was announced in 2021. This month, XPRIZE released the detailed “Getting to Gigaton” report, which provided comprehensive data and analysis of the top 100 teams. A few weeks later, they announced the top 20 finalist teams competing for the grand prize. The report and the selection of the top teams provide a state of play for the industry by showing what methodologies are most ready to grow to a gigaton scale, according to XPRIZE's expert CDR judges. Today's show is with Nikki Batchelor, the Executive Director of XPRIZE Carbon Removal, and Mike Leitch, the Senior Technical Lead, about how they selected the top 20, what they found in this report, and what comes next for the competition. On This Episode Nikki Batchelor Mike Leitch ⁠Radhika Moolgavkar⁠ Resources “Getting to Gigaton”⁠ report Connect with Nori ⁠⁠⁠⁠Nori⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠Nori’s X account⁠⁠⁠⁠ Nori’s other podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠Reversing Climate Change⁠⁠⁠⁠ Nori’s CDR ⁠⁠⁠⁠meme X account