Jackson Alum Leads Team to Win $50M Carbon Competition Prize

In April, Jake Jordan, an alum from the Jackson School of Geoscience at The University of Texas at Austin, led a team to win a $50 million prize in the XPRIZE Foundation Carbon Removal competition.  

Jordan, who graduated with a Ph.D. in geosciences from the Jackson School in 2017, serves as chief science officer at Mati Carbon, a company that works to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through enhanced rock weathering (ERW). The company was chosen from among more than 1,300 teams working in 88 countries to win the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition. 

The team from Mati Carbon found that by sprinkling basalt onto farmlands, they could remove carbon dioxide from the air while simultaneously restoring nutrients to the soil. They provide this method free of charge to smallholder farmers in India, Tanzania and Zambia. 

So far, the company has partnered with more than 16,000 farmers to remineralize more than 15,000 acres of farmland. This has led to an overall boost in crop yields by up to 20 percent, economically empowering farmers in the global South while mitigating carbon dioxide.  

“We offer this mode of carbon dioxide removal through a program that is expressly built to benefit a population of farmers who are among the least responsible for, and most vulnerable to, the impacts of climate change,” Jordan said in a news release.  

Mati Carbon plans to use the $50 million dollar prize to build the relevant infrastructure needed to help farmers while delivering verifiable carbon dioxide removal at a global scale. Their goal is to make ERW a common agricultural practice that reaches 100 million smallholder farmers in developing economies within the next 20 years.  

To learn more about Mati Carbon and Jake Jordan, please visit the original story at Mati Carbon or Texas Geoscience's Instagram.