Halifax’s Planetary Technologies has won a US$1 million Milestone Award from the new US$100 million Carbon Removal XPRIZE.

The latest version of the XPRIZE, which is funded by the Elon Musk Foundation and will award its grand prize in 2025, has given the interim Milestone Award to 15 of the 1,133 businesses competing to develop and scale the best commercial applications for captured carbon dioxide emissions.

Founded in Ottawa in 2019, Planetary has developed a system to convert alkaline rocks left over from mining operations into a substance called bicarbonate, which it will release into the ocean to counteract ocean acidification and chemically extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. An alkaline substance is one with a pH greater than seven — essentially the opposite of an acid.

"Scaling innovation moves at the speed of trust," wrote Planetary CEO Mike Kelland on LinkedIn. "The scale of investment in climate technology is directly correlated to the level of trust that funders have in that technology. 

"The XPRIZE creates trust ... That trust accelerates progress and deployment, which begets more trust. And that acceleration is what we, and other carbon removal companies, need most."

The XPRIZE judging panel includes more than 70 internationally recognized carbon removal and climate innovation experts.

Last year, Dartmouth-based CarbonCure Technologies was one of two companies to split the first prize in the initial Carbon XPRIZE, which offered US$20 million up for grabs. It was awarded to companies finding commercial uses for carbon that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere. Now, the Elon Musk Foundation has funded a new XPRIZE for carbon removal and increased the prize pot to US$100 million, which it says is the largest cash prize in history.

Planetary’s process is the brainchild of Chief Technology Officer Greg Rau and creates hydrogen as a byproduct, which the company sells, as well as carbon credits.

Last month, the company – formerly known as Planetary Hydrogen – said it had raised $7.8 million, including $4.2 million of equity funding and $3.6 million of grants.

“Solving for climate is the wicked combination of innovation and scale, both of which need to be done FAST,” wrote Kelland of the scale of Planetary’s ambitions. “We won’t find perfect, magic wands that allow us to just ‘fix’ the climate.

“These solutions need to be huge systems and large infrastructure investments. And we need to get there much sooner than a traditional technology could scale to those levels.”

The other two Atlantic Canadian companies vying for the XPRIZE are Reazent, and for a second time, CarbonCure.

CarbonCure sells technology to inject carbon dioxide into concrete, sequestering it and strengthening the end product. Concrete is the second most abundant man-made material in the world, and cement, its key ingredient, is responsible for an estimated 7 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

And Reazent, originally founded in India by CEO Sumit Verma, is developing organic bio-stimulants – fertilizers and pesticides that protect plants against disease and increase crop yields. The company is now based in Halifax after moving to Nova Scotia as part of the AscendBio program, which works with industrial life sciences companies that use the fermentation facilities at the Verschuren Centre in Sydney.