Maurice Bryson, founder of Silicate. Image: Declan Colfer Photography
Based in NovaUCD, Silicate has developed technology to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere through the weathering of silicate and hydroxide minerals.
Irish carbon removal start-up Silicate has been named as one of 20 global finalists at the Xprize Carbon Removal competition, which is funded by the Musk Foundation.
In an announcement today (8 May), the Sligo-founded start-up said that it is the only Irish start-up on the list, bringing it a step closer to the $50m grand prize.
The Musk Foundation, founded by Elon Musk more than two decades ago, focuses on donating money to a variety of tech research and innovation causes: from renewable energy and human space exploration to paediatric research, STEM education and AI.
The Xprize Carbon Removal competition saw more than 1,300 teams from across the world develop new ideas for carbon removal. Silicate, a former Start-up of the Week, does exactly that.
Based in NovaUCD, Silicate has developed technology to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the weathering of silicate and hydroxide minerals. The start-up uses returned concrete as a weathering agent – which is processed and spread on agricultural land to sequester carbon at scale.
“Silicate is the first company in the world to utilise this material to sequester carbon at scale, and we have developed robust in-situ measurement and modelling capabilities to verify the rates of carbon removal we enable,” founder Maurice Bryson told SiliconRepublic.com last year.
The top 20 finalists were selected based on their performance in three key areas: operations, sustainability and cost. They were able to demonstrate to the Xprize team that their approach had the ability to remove 1,000 net tonnes of carbon dioxide in the final year of the competition and had a “viable pathway to reaching megatonne scale” in the coming years.
“Being selected as a finalist in this prestigious competition is an exciting opportunity for our team to demonstrate the potential of terrestrial enhanced weathering with carbonate-bearing materials to durably sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide,” Bryson said today.
“Xprize’s recognition and support of our work is a boon to our mission to leverage agricultural value chains to durably remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while increasing soil productivity through pH amendment.”
In March last year, Silicate was announced as one of only two start-ups to win the Thrive/Shell Climate-smart Agriculture Challenge 2023 under the ‘game changer’ category. The other winner was US-based Gazelle, a climate-tech start-up focused on ecological restoration.
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