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 Gigatonne” 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 gigatonne 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
Radhika Moolgavkar
Resources
“Getting to Gigatonne” report
Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous
My other show, Reversing Climate Change
Books referenced in the podcasts, at Bookshop
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello, I am Radhika Moolgavkar, VP of Supply and Methodology at Nori. The XPRIZE remains one of the top stories in carbon removal and one of the largest funding sources for CDR startups. 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 1,000 teams worldwide have applied since the award was announced in 2021. This month, XPRIZE released the detailed Getting to Gigatonne report, which provided comprehensive data 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 gigatonne scale according to XPRIZE’s expert CDR judges. I challenge anyone to say XPRIZE expert fast. Today we’ll talk with Nikki Batchelor, the Executive Director of XPRIZE Carbon Removal, and Mike Leach, the Senior Technical Lead, about how they selected the top 20, what they found in this report, and what comes next for the competition. So Nikki, welcome back.
Nikki Batchelor: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And Mike, welcome to your first podcast with us. So glad to have you.
Mike Leitch: I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, let’s get started. So obviously last week, I believe you guys announced your finalists. They were all over my LinkedIn. Very exciting. So Nikki, what is the current stage of the Carbon Removal XPRIZE and what are the remaining milestones from here?
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, great question. Well, to kick off, we’re just getting to the good stuff. This is really what we’ve been waiting for for years and years from the design to the launch to the team recruitment phases that we’ve been pushing through over the last few years. We’re really getting into the finals. This is the last year of the prize from our perspective in terms of operations, but also it’s the real moment where the teams are being asked to remove carbon from the air or the atmosphere and store it durably. And so that’s kind of what we’re testing people to see this year.
And the series of announcements that you kind of mentioned earlier, first we came out with our top 100 because it’s really important to us to be thinking about Catalyzing and supporting the whole industry, not just a few number of carbon removal companies. So first we wanted to come out with that list. Then we came out with the Getting to Giga10 report, which we’ll really dive into today, some of that interesting data. And then we announced the top 20 finalists. And those are the companies who will be moving forward in this last year with us and will be completing site visits to all of their locations with our Measurement and Verification teams, and we’ll be collecting that data and compiling everything for the judges to do a comprehensive review of all of the work completed this year.
And then we’ll, yeah, we’ll give away the rest of the money. So next year we’ll be awarding $80 million, which will be really exciting for us to hand over those checks, but also probably more so for the teams who are on the other side of that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. So Nikki, I’m envisioning this huge like award ceremony. Have you guys even started thinking about what this is going to look like? That’s so much money.
Nikki Batchelor: We have a few ideas that we’re throwing around. I think this is always, you know, up for debate, the best way to kind of conclude a prize and, you know, make a big splash for the end. And so we’re talking with some potential partners about how to do that and really, you know, use this as a platform to help Get shine on all of the teams that are really receiving those checks, but also the 20 finalists who have completed a lot of work to date and will be making incredible progress in 2024 too.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s amazing. So this question is for both of you. You recently released a list of 100 finalists and it featured many companies and projects that CDR watchers are familiar with. So what sets the final 20 apart and who made this round? So Mike, I’ll start with you and then Nikki, if you want to add anything to Mike’s answer.
Mike Leitch: Yeah, thanks. I mean, the top 20 are still a very diverse crowd. We’ve really been excited right from day one at the diversity of solutions that have been attracted to the competition. And indeed, we kind of designed the competition to try and be as accepting and as broad in scope as possible. And we’ve seen that play out throughout every round of the competition. So we have five direct air capture companies. Five land-based removal companies, four ocean-based removal companies, and six rock-based removal companies. But even within those four, we talk about things in these four tracks, air, land, ocean, and rocks.
But even within each of those tracks, there’s a huge amount of diversity. And like Nikki said, we’re just thrilled to be in the homestretch where you can see these projects up close and personal and really see what each one of them has to offer.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Nikki, anything else you want to add?
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, just at a high level, you know, to remind folks the way the competition is structured is we’re really looking across three broad criteria. We’re looking at, you know, their operational readiness and how they’re performing now. We’re looking at their sustainability criteria, how they scale up over time. And we’re looking at cost and all of those things together kind of make up the holistic view that we take in the judging room. And so I’ll let Mike dive into the details of some of those criteria and what that means for us.
But the 20 teams who made it to the finals really excelled across those categories.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so Nikki really teed up the next question nicely for you, Mike. I mean, as she mentioned, the finalists were selected for their ability to sustainably reach kilotonne, megatonne and gigatonne scales. So how do you evaluate their ability to reach these larger scales, which I assume are years away when you’re looking at their current operations?
Mike Leitch: Yeah, well, it’s important to note that one of the important parts of the XPRIZE and one of the distinctions of the XPRIZE is that this is a demonstration competition. So one of the things we try to do, even when we’re talking about megatonne and gigatonne scale in the future, is challenge teams to tie those claims back to what they’re able to demonstrate today. So we asked teams to demonstrate at a kilotonne scale, that’s remove and durably sequester 1,000 tonnes of CO2 in 12 months, and then estimate their costs at a projected megatonne scale, and then demonstrate the potential to accomplish gigatonne scale types of, you know, quantities of CDR sustainably.
Obviously, the further you look out and the larger, you know, The larger you extrapolate, the greater there is uncertainty. But we always, like I said, try to tie that back to demonstrated data today and then challenge the teams to really connect the dots and show how they’re going to accomplish their potential going forward.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so you mentioned one of the challenges, which is extrapolating the future, but obviously you were also looking at a variety of technologies presented. So what were some of the other challenging aspects of evaluating these entries?
Mike Leitch: Like I said before, we really worked hard to make sure that we could accommodate a very broad variety of solution types. And I think one of the interesting things about CDR is it really is the ends justify the means. You can get to carbon removal a number of different ways. And we found that to be a fascinating aspect of the competition because Every solution type really does have their advantages and disadvantages, and we’ve been able to see some of those trade-offs play out in the competition. Where that kind of landed in this latest round of judging is that Tension between the practical requirements of the competition, that is the demonstration requirement and the challenges of operating today versus the potential for future impact.
Many teams, especially now, there’s a lot of people developing new CDR technologies and they’re in some cases still raising money or very small in scale and they’re trying to make those sustainability claims, but they don’t quite have the demonstrations together yet. We really worked with the judges to try and find a balance. We needed to identify teams that had both the ability to operate today and who have a very strong understanding of their pathway to large scale and a clear path to doing so sustainably.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So we just talked about the technical side, but Nikki, there’s also a social side. I think it’s something that I think about a lot, but I know you do too. So as you were evaluating these groups and these companies, how do you think about social sustainability? What does your evaluation look like? And what is the type of work these companies are planning to do to engage with the communities they’re working in?
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s something we’ve really been focusing on a lot over the last three years. Especially because this is such a new industry, there’s so much opportunity actually to influence the way that it’s developing. And so, you know, in the first phase of the competition, we were really trying to just start to prompt teams to think about a lot of questions along these lines. Who are the potential types of communities you might be We worked with Carbon 180 during the first phase of the prize to really analyze a lot of those initial responses we got from the milestone round of the competition and we kind of published a report then.
That discussed a lot of the findings. We knew then for phase two, we wanted to go deeper, but also, you know, the bar is getting higher. People are progressing, time is passing, and they’re starting to build real pilots in the world. So we wanted to have a series of questions that really dive into all of the different areas that are relevant here. And we worked with both the Carbon Business Council to Develop and support their development of an online training around responsible deployment that we required everyone in the prize to take.
So it’s an eight module online training that’s available to anyone working in the space. And then we also worked with American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal to develop an approach to the submission questions. And as part of that research process, we kind of surveyed the whole field right now. What other people are asking project developers, you know, everyone from DOE to funders and Try to synthesize that and also look at adjacent industries that have been working with communities for a long time, you know, from other larger energy projects, international development projects, other spaces where we might have learnings and synthesize that into, you know, our approach for the prize, which was a series of questions we asked teams to really dive into and it covered everything from Understanding the impacted communities.
What would your approach be to community engagement? How do you assess the project risks and impacts of those projects? How do you explore project benefits? What is a priority? How can you be creative here about bringing benefits back to the communities? How do you ensure there’s transparency and accountability and also build local capacity over time as you’re working in these spaces? So those were kind of our focus areas. And we also published resources for teams on how to think about all of these. Papers and guides and templates and things like that, because for many of them, this is the first time they’ve done that.
But also we have seen a huge appetite and interest in learning how to do it better. So I think it’s kind of been a learning process for everyone along the way, but hopefully the industry is better for it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, definitely, you guys are paving the way and helping people think about this, I think, completely differently. So it sounds like you’ve done an amazing job. Now I want to pivot a little bit to just talking about the four tracks, which were mentioned earlier. Mike, you made the note that all of these pathways have different tradeoffs. So when you are looking at these pathways or tracks, what are some of the most significant differences between them in terms of price, energy use, footprint, anything else we should be thinking about?
Mike Leitch: Yeah, I mean, I think the what was kind of interesting when we when we did this latest round of submissions and data collection, we you know, a lot of the trends that we saw didn’t really surprise us too much. You know, the air teams tend to be a little bit more expensive. They consume more energy, whereas the land teams are less expensive, but their durability is lower and they obviously typically take more land, you know. I think across the board, those types of trade-offs that people talk about and have been talking about for years are still playing out to a certain extent, but One of the things that kind of surprised me was the diversity within the tracks, you know, even with, I would say like across all of these metrics that the four tracks do overlap, even though the averages kind of play out one versus another.
There is a great deal of diversity. So, you know, within the air track, there are actually a great deal of teams that operate at very low prices or low energy consumptions. And many land teams are finding more durable ways to sequester the captured CO2. So I’m You know, I think in some senses that represents sort of a, it just represents the amount of innovations going into the space. You know, people are trying to leverage the inherited advantages of the, you know, the pathway that they work in and use science and technology and innovation to address some of the weaknesses.
And so we’re starting to see that play out. I would encourage everyone to download the Getting to Giga 10 report. It’s on our website. And there’s hundreds of nice, colorful charts that help lay out some of those ideas and demonstrate that diversity.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, that’s such an incredibly optimistic thing to hear, right? That you’re seeing things converge in a good way really makes me feel happy. So Nikki, he did mention the five air teams, but you know, you have five DAC teams that made the final 20. Some of the maybe bigger, more well-funded original DAC companies aren’t on the list. So what sets these five apart from the older DAC companies that have maybe drawn more funding from traditional sources?
Nikki Batchelor: I think there’s both an art and a science to setting goals that are both ambitious enough to push an industry forward and result in breakthroughs, but not too ambitious that they only favor incumbents, which really is hard. You know, there’s always going to be a few incumbents, even in a new industry. And so, you know, we want to make sure that we don’t stifle the early innovation for the next generation of companies with the design. Has been bigger is not always better. And so we wanted to set a meaningful goal for the demonstration that was a floor basically that you had to get to some, you know, reasonable amount of removal.
We set the goal at 1000 tonnes. And from that, we could test and validate the merits of each of the approaches. So that design choice, I think automatically it set some of the earlier incumbents down a path that maybe this wasn’t the right fit for them because they might already be past that goal. And so I think they’ve all made their own choice about if it was kind of a good decision to be in the competition. But regardless, I think everyone in the industry has been so supportive, especially the early incumbents.
I think we’re all very aware that, you know, Carbon removal is a new space and it’s like we all succeed or fail together in some ways. And so I think, you know, we’ve all been very supportive of the early efforts here. And I think that we’re seeing a new generation kind of come out of the prize as well now. So I think hopefully we’re accomplishing both because we’re seeing great announcements and accomplishments from those early dot companies and everyone’s cheering them on from the sidelines, but we’re also Seeing kind of new breakthroughs on different areas that need to be advanced in the earlier dot companies.
So I will say though that the competition overall was really steep for the 20 finalist spots. I think It was an optimistic, hopeful view five years ago that we would have tonnes of companies in the space even to compete in the prize, but we didn’t know that for sure. We had no idea where people would be, how many folks would be on the table now. And so I think we really wish we could have awarded more than 20 finalist spots. I think that was kind of a practical limitation in some ways of it’s just very resource intensive to be able to Operate the finals of the competition and do testing and validation and site visits for those teams.
So I know that, you know, there are a lot of teams that are really deserving in the top 100 that didn’t quite make it into the finals. But I think we’re going to see amazing things from in the next few years.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, that’s all good news, right? It sounds like it surpassed your wildest expectations in some ways. So that’s pretty fantastic overall. And can’t wait to see what all these teams develop. So Mike, let’s turn to the next track, which is the oceans category, which I think is arguably the most diverse in types of approaches. So when you are looking at ocean teams, what were you looking for and how are you comparing such different tech?
Mike Leitch: Yeah, I mean, I’ll say just on a personal note, you know, I do not have an oceans background and learning about ocean CDR and seeing all of the Sort of amazing ways that people are trying to leverage the ocean in service of the greater climate has been really interesting to learn about over the last couple of years. I would say that generally, and this is across the board, but it’s particularly true in the ocean, is anytime you are adding something to the ocean or trying to manipulate the ocean, people get really nervous.
The ocean is sort of, it’s a commons, it’s a source of Great economic livelihood to so much of the world and a great stabilizer in terms of our climate as well. So everybody from the judges all the way down to the teams has been really focused on making sure that all of the deployers for the XPRIZE, but in the CDR industry at large, are focused on safe, ecologically, and socially responsible deployment. So I’ll just say that first and foremost, that played out, you know, I would say in an outsized way in the oceans field, because there is such a such a sensitivity to the ecological impact of Ocean CDR.
But you also mentioned methodologies, and I think, you know, that there’s also been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about the scientific rigor and development of new methodologies and the level of uncertainty versus uncertainty in the Ocean CDR game. And we definitely wanted the competition to encourage the development of new CDR methodologies. We also wanted to make sure that the competition was open for... Perhaps more frontier or new types of CDR that maybe were reflected in existing methodologies. So we don’t require teams to be working under a formal or third party or accredited methodology, but we do require teams to sort of be responsible for their own operations and demonstrate the ways that they are following best practices.
And in particular, Where projects have ecological implications, making sure that they’re following all local standards and complying with all the other regulations as well as acceptance amongst the communities around them.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, and turning now to land, Biochar was the most produced product among the final 100 teams. So Mike, did you find that this revenue stream gave that methodology or that technology an advantage to help it grow more quickly?
Mike Leitch: Yeah, definitely. The product angle is really interesting. And, you know, of the top 100, 71 teams produce products. So, you know, the vast majority of the CER industry that we are seeing is really focused on producing products. Half of that, about 30 teams are producing biochar. So there really is a kind of an outsized product. I, you know, outsized cohort of biochar companies in entering the CDR business. And, and I think the fact that it’s a sellable product and they can generate revenue definitely helps, you know, regardless of your stance on the carbon markets, you know, that’s a tangible thing that can sustain a business.
You know, a nice thing about biochar is it’s relatively easy to produce. So it, it is kind of like a, not only is it a, is it a, um, An industry with a relatively low barrier to entry from a production standpoint, it’s also relatively inexpensive, the equipment that you need to produce biochar. So I think there are a lot of advantages to biochar, and it’s no surprise that there are so many biochar teams represented amongst the top 100 and the top 20.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And finally, last but not least, Nikki, let’s talk about the rocks category, because it had the most finalists with six, which I have to admit, I was a little surprised about. So are you surprised with the success of the mineral carbonation based approaches? And why do you think they are, you know, they’re so well represented in the finals?
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, I think that. We weren’t trying to make some grand statement by picking six. I think I’ll just clarify that. But the judges were very intentional in the review process to make sure we had A diverse representation across CDR pathways in the final cohort. You know, we’re excited to see how all of these mostly ERW companies play out. I think they all have different takes on that. I think it’s an area that everyone is very curious about right now. So we’re hoping that the competition can really be a platform to collect more data and distribute, you know, successes of those teams in a broader forum.
And validate those approaches so we can see if these are really the ones that are on the path to scale and how they fit into the CDR portfolio.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, final question about the companies and the pathways and tracks before getting to the report. I’m just curious, now that you are into the final 20, how will you be working with these teams moving forward? You mentioned, of course, site visits and things like that, but you also mentioned before that you provided Various technical resources. So will that type of work continue? I’m not sure who’s best to answer that question. So if one of you wants to just jump in.
Mike Leitch: Yeah, I can start. I mean, first of all, I’ll say it’s like a breath of fresh air for us having a defined group of 20 teams that we can work with. We were thrilled with the amount of interest and enthusiasm and 1,400 teams joining the competition. But man, that was a lot and way too many teams for us to really sort of get into it with. At a very deep level of detail. So I know we’re really looking forward to working with these 20 teams more closely. We have developed some assessment tools.
We developed a life cycle analysis and techno-economic screening tool that we used in part to help the judges determine, choose the 20 finalists. And that’s kind of serving as the input for our technical verification program that we’re going to use over the course of the finals. So we’ve hired some third-party contractors, all experts in both performance services. Verification as well as sustainability analysis and cost analysis. And we’re going to be working with them over the next eight months really to scrutinize all 20 teams. We’re going to be visiting each of the 20 teams at their sites and really getting to know them and sort of looking under the hood and kicking the tires, but also showing them off a little bit and making sure that the whole world understands what these projects look like and where they are and how big they are.
I just think it’s a fascinating time to see these demonstrations in action.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I’m jealous, Mike, that you get to see all this in action. I would love to see some of these projects. All right, let’s talk about the report, which was a huge body of work and also a huge amount of data and information contained in there. You know, I think the first question is always kind of what was your biggest takeaway from this report and what did it teach you about the state of the industry, Nikki?
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, so we really spent a good amount of time thinking about what should this report even be when we were sitting on all the data that came in from the finalist submissions that came to us at the beginning of February of this year. And we cycled all of it through the judges to get to the outcome of the 20 finalists. That was kind of its first objective. Its secondary objective was to publish learnings back to the community. So we were trying to contextualize The amazing progress that’s been made to date against how far we still have to go, which is really like the ultimate tension that this industry is grappling with right now.
You know, we need to take a moment to recognize, you know, both from, um, A human engineering and business perspective, how significant it is to do kilotonne scale removal and what it means to, you know, turn those machines on for the first time or run, you know, your process and do a thousand tonnes of removal, which many of these companies are really doing for the first time in 2024, especially in this, you know, newer novel category and carbon removal. It’s very early stages. A lot of these companies have already raised between $5 and $50 million to get them where they are now.
And 75% of our top 100 are actively fundraising this year to meet their next set of goals. So just as businesses, they’re really growing rapidly and have huge demands on their capital requirements. I think... Some of the interesting takeaways for me, and I’ll, you know, let Mike add what some of his top lines were too, as we talk about it. We’re just, we asked the teams to give us some projections of, you know, where you’re at in 2024 and each year. So that’s the next big milestone that we’re shooting for as an industry.
Collectively, how do we get multiple companies to reach megatonscale carbon removal? And interestingly, a lot of companies were hovering around the 2030 mark, kind of before and after that, until like 2035. Most of them, I think, had said they’ll reach Megatonne by 2035 of the top 100 teams. And, you know, that’s really helpful real data to have. It is aspirational or optimistic, I should say, in some cases, because none of these things have been delivered upon yet. But, you know, we need to be benchmarking against where each of these companies are targeting their own business plans to get to, where they’re How they’re making their own offtake agreements for those of them that are signing big deals.
They have delivery requirements that they’re going to need to meet each year and then the coming decade. And so it’s important to think about how all of these milestones stack on top of each other and not just to keep Kind of reiterating that, you know, we need gigatonne scale removal by 2050. That’s a huge goal. And if you break it down and work backwards, we have tremendous progress that needs to be made year over year. And that really starts with Having fully operational demonstration pilots this year up and running, removing real CO2, and all of those companies being able to meet their own fundraising goals in the next few years.
Because if those two things don’t happen together now in 24, 25, and 26th, We’ll be in real trouble by 2030 and definitely off course by 2050. So we’re trying to kind of bring the near term and the future together in this report by really looking at data from operating companies.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I wonder if any other beginning industry had any this treasure trove of data like solar probably didn’t have this information. So it’s a whole interesting new approach to growing a brand new industry. Mike, anything else you want to add in terms of something that you were surprised or your biggest takeaway?
Mike Leitch: Well, I think the main point for me is just is, you know, every every data point we’ve collected kind of reinforces the fact that there is no silver bullet here. You know, it’s sort of like an irony of the prize that we’re giving away this huge 50 million dollar prize to one winner. But The reality is, if we’re going to hit our climate goals, we really need to deploy a diverse number of solutions, and it really is going to require a global effort. So, you know, the data we’ve collected in this report really sort of helps So it kind of helped me wrap my head around what that gigatonne scale CDR industry might look like and what the implications of having gigatonnes of CO2 being removed every year will look like.
It’s no small feat. Gigatonne is kind of a fun word to say, but a billion tonnes is a lot. And if you’re imagining a team operating at a thousand tonnes a day, they have to get a million times bigger. You know, and so you multiply anything by a million times. And, you know, one of our judges likes to say the you know, you multiply anything by a million and the numbers become daunting, you know, and and we’ve seen that play out. I don’t I don’t want to leave on a negative note.
I think there’s a lot of good in the report, but just focusing on the fact that we really need everybody to succeed and and we need to support the health of the whole industry.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so I’m going to ask you another question that’s, you know, a tougher question maybe. Is what are the bottlenecks that you see from a technical perspective to growing to gigatonne scale? And is there overlap between the various tracks or are they pretty divergent?
Mike Leitch: Yeah, I mean, I think there are trade-offs in every track. Those trade-offs still exist. Energy is the big one that comes to mind. You know, we sort of were trying to find some We’re trying to find some ways to sort of contextualize the energy intensity of a hypothetical gigatonne scale cohort in the report. And we found that the energy required by the top 100 teams, if they were all operating at a collective gigatonne scale, would actually require more carbon neutral energy than the United States produces today. All of it, right?
And so I think on the energy front, it’s kind of like, and almost regardless of track, we really need to be thinking about what infrastructure and what other resource needs, both energy needs, natural resources. We need to develop and develop in a responsible way to really power the CDR industry. And it’s not so easy. Again, we’re kind of talking about big numbers. But, you know, in the meantime, in the meantime, I think the other sort of sort of another kind of exciting thing for me, you know, I’m an engineer and what I’m really kind of excited about is sort of this transition that we’re seeing from questions of like.
Do these things work scientifically like, you know, in a beaker to how do we deploy them? Right. What engineering do we need to do? What supply chains do we need to have in place? I actually think that’s a very exciting problem. It’s a problem that many industries know how to do very well already. So there’s like lots of talent in the world already who can help deploy these these industries and carry them forward. But it’s also a huge challenge. So a long ways to go. It’s kind of like I think our sort of main, you know, our main attitude here is kind of like, you know, we need collective action.
We need a diversity of solutions. And we kind of just need to sort of put one foot in front of the other and keep focusing on those next milestones as we collectively get to greater scales.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s well put, Mike. I agree. One step forward. Just keep moving forward. So, Nikki, last question for you, which is we talked about the grand party you’re going to have when you announce your top 20. Really, how do you envision this competition can help increase public support for carbon removal? And, you know, how do you think that effort is going now and what else would you like to do?
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, it’s a great question to land on because this is really, how do we continue building momentum for the space and pushing things forward one step at a time? I mean, it really comes down to awareness, understanding and acceptance. I think, you know, each one of those has maybe a different strategy to kind of drive further forward, but You know, for awareness, we really tried to use the prize from the early days as a platform to get more people to even know that this is a thing to understand why it’s important that carbon removal be thotted alongside reductions in the whole climate strategy and what a critical piece of reaching that zero it will play.
Now that we’re at the final year of the prize, we have valuable assets of these actual, the companies doing the real removal. We’re going to bring film crews with us to all of the site visits. We’re going to try and tell their stories, get that narrative out there. People need to understand that it’s not just an idea that needs to happen, but it’s happening and it’s making fast progress. So I think It will become maybe less scary to people who are unfamiliar with it once they see what it looks like to have any of these kind of systems up and running.
But also it’s just a great storytelling vehicle to help get more, you know, shine on the projects that are out there and make that part the broader climate conversation. So we’re hoping to continue to do storytelling. We’re supporting other kind of storytelling efforts in the space and Some other fun things that will be coming out. So hopefully a lot of that will be added in and we’ll be making progress in 2025. More people will know what carbon removal is, what it looks like, and why it’s an important piece of what we need to figure out in the next decades.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I for one am very excited to follow the companies, hear the storytelling, see what interesting and innovative things you guys all bring forward. Mike, Nikki, thank you so much for joining us. And I really am excited to see what the next year brings. Thanks so much.
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