The Carbon X-Prize Chapter- My Take
By: Apoorv Sinha
Tags: Construction, Entrepreneurship, Cleantech, Startup

I was 25 when Carbon Upcycling Technologies entered the Carbon X-Prize. Back then, we wondered if the 8K application fee was a worthwhile investment for a competition of which we knew so little about the rules. We threw our name in the hat anyway.

The CarbonTech industry (i.e. The industry working on capturing, sequestering, and valorizing CO2) is still only nascent and it was hardly a topic of conversation then. Our company had been borne out of a similar open innovation challenge held by a crown corporation in Alberta only a year and a half prior and as a team of 3 part-time employees, we were only beginning to get a faint idea of the challenges involved in evolving and commercializing a hardware technology to market.

As such, Carbon Upcycling has spent the majority of its existence within the Carbon X-Prize and it has been my longest professional project to date.

The notion of an X-Prize and the merits of open innovation challenges have been extolled for a long period of time, and rightly so. The earliest, most prominent example of an (successful) open innovation challenge are probably the Longitude Awards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards)- developed to incentivize inventors to create practical ways of determining longitude at sea.

Although technology and globalization has changed much in the delivery of open innovation, the fundamental tenets of what makes such challenges exciting has been relatively immutable. Namely, the democratization of opportunity to solve an important problem and the possibility of leveraging resources through the solution development process are key benefits of the approach for the sponsor. The proposition for the proponents isn’t as straight-forward, but generally offers a pathway to repute and creative collaborations and, eventually, commercial success.

From Carbon Upcycling’s perspective, the Carbon X-Prize did seem like a good fit given where we were and where we wanted to go directionally. In the first round, we focused our efforts on a 1000x scale-up from a 1 kilogram reactor to a batch size of over 1 ton, particularly focusing on the use of graphite-based additives as nucleators in polymers such as Polyethylene and, to a lesser extent, Polypropylene.

In the final round, we shifted our facility and built a commercial demonstration unit that produced 20 tons per batch of end product tailored for use in the construction sector. It would have been a tough undertaking without COVID but the pandemic and being shut down from site for 3 months all led to major challenges.

Delays and shutdowns are difficult enough for smaller installations but pilot-scale industrial installations can exacerbate supply chain issues. Sourcing a pair of 600 horsepower motors or a VFD or associated coupling is not straightforward, nor is securing supply of hundreds of tons of materials. Often, a 100$ part during commissioning with a 2 day lead time can upend plans and delay commissioning by multiple days.

The magnitude of the task we had undertaken, and its contrast with the scarce resources we had on hand became amply clear in mid-July, when the discovery of a major design flaw in our large installation set us back by a few critical weeks. What followed was a torrent of 16–20 hour days for a full-time team of 8 people and a handful of contractors that didn’t end till the data submission round of the Prize ended in early December.

The ridiculous toil wasn’t without sweat, tears, or spilled blood. While working on the commissioning, I fell and got a bloody eye and had a concussion for a week. Fortunately, this was the only safety-related injury we had on site but the amount of work, creativity, and toil that went into the competition left us all tired and spun around through the holidays.

The CarbonTech industry needs scaleup. For the 36 billion tons of CO2-equivalent emissions produced from anthropogenic sources every year, less than 45 million tons of CO2 are sequestered. That is less than 0.12%

The rapid, bootstrapped scale up exercise taught us a lot. Commissioning industrial-scale equipment is not a mean feat at the best of times and for us to have produced over 1000 hours of operational run time over the various scales of reactors was no mean feat. I personally learned a lot through the exercise- managing vendors and different personalities, not to mention project budgeting and some practical skills like amateur welding, grinding, pipefitting, and even rotating equipment installation.

One of multiple days when I helped in the shop with a grinder. I also learned to put down a proper bead (on a good day, consistently) with a MIG or arc welder.

In the time between the initiation and conclusion of the XPRIZE, our team has managed 4 major corporate relationships, 8 different research partnerships, filed 3 patents, and hired over 50 contractors along with a full-time staff of 8 people. Our collaborators have synthesized graphene oxide and tested protein-nanomaterial complexes for enhanced drug delivery to cancer cells (both in-vitro and in-vivo), showed improvements in rubber composites used in yoga mats and rubber tires, and created an extensive repository of data showing that our CO2-embedded cementitious materials can not only reduce cement use in concrete by over 10% (not just in a lab but in field deployments) but also make the concrete less susceptible to deleterious phenomena such as chloride or sulfate attacks. Through the last 5 years, we have allocated over CAD 10 MM in capital towards technical development and scale-up efforts and, all in all, we have done more than a respectable job with the resources on hand. I have made some mistakes with capital and resource allocation but, as most immigrants do, I’ve always been very mindful of how money was spent.

We found out a few days before the public announcement that we were not one of the winners of the Carbon XPRIZE. It was a bitter pill to swallow, and frankly hurt a lot more than my injury in September.

We had to make a critical decision right at the onset of the Finals of the XPRIZE- taking on the very difficult job of pulling off a commercial scale demonstration with little time to optimize the operation, or to play the safe game with a smaller installation that could be installed quickly and leave plenty of time for optimization in recovery and conversion.

We took the bigger bet.

Nothing grand is ever built with optimization first in mind. The vision and the scale come first, and the optimization thereafter.

It is perhaps besides the point as to whether I agree with the judges’ view of the most promising demonstrations at the ACCTC (I do not) and if the appropriate weight was given to the multitude of factors involved and traded off during the exercise (Again, I don’t). I would be happy to share my thoughts on this with pertinent parties if it is of interest.

And although we weren’t able to make a compelling enough case to the judges of the Carbon XPRIZE, there are some very important things we did achieve that do stand out and make me extremely proud despite the bitter conclusion of this chapter.

I trained as an engineer and, as such, I think of accomplishments and milestones in relatively tangible and objective terms.

Below is a list of some undeniable progress from the past 6 years-

Scaling our technology over 10,000x through the prize

Selling CO2-derived product from our demonstration- to a local ready-mix company- something we continue to do on site post XPRIZE. The running tally of delivered product is over 200 tons at the time of writing this piece. That is 440,000 pounds.

Demonstrating and proving 10% cement reduction potential of our CO2-treated SCM in the field in 5 deployments

Enabling the formation of five small businesses through our consumer product lines singularly by facilitating access to carbon-derived products

Building a solid core team of extremely motivated and adaptable individuals that I am proud to call colleagues and prouder to call friends. I acknowledge this one isn’t tangible or objective. But it is an objective observation that when the prize launched, two critical members of the team were still in high school while two others were still finishing their post-secondary education.

Actively engaging with two of the world’s 10 largest cement companies- Stay tuned for more on this front!

During the difficult Fall, I wrote a long letter to the team in an effort to coax one extra mile out of our ragged legs. One particular line from the email struck me upon reflection:

“I genuinely believe what we’re working on is important. Yes, we are not launching people into space but we’re possibly building the fundamental foundation for a future when those in space might have something to come back to on Earth.”

I would have shared the whole letter if we had won, but in loss, this excerpt feels sufficient.

I believe, more so than ever, that the type of work we’re doing is exactly what is required — not just from us but from our colleagues in this still-nascent field.

To paraphrase what Robert California said in The List episode of The Office: the onus post XPRIZE is for the winners to prove the judges right and for the others, to prove them wrong.

I know where my convictions and those of my team lie, and I look forward to acting upon them in the years to come.