January 2022 was a busy month for ImpactScope. It started out with a field trip to our offsetting partners in East Africa and ended with our submission to the next round of the $100M XPRIZE for Carbon Removal funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation.
On January 6th, ImpactScope signed a project development MOU with Eastern Agricultural Development Company in Soroti Uganda. EADC manages a network of >3,000 mostly female farmers who feed into the EADC production supply chain. The smallholder farmers are provided with clean seeds several times a year, and guaranteed produce purchase agreements at fair market prices.
This week EADC will begin construction of a EUR 500 k processing facility for the pre-cooking and packaging of iron-rich beans. Once it achieves full operational capacity the facility will be capable of producing 1 MT of pre-cooked beans per day.
Pre-cooked beans require 75 % less cooking time and 80 % less firewood. The resulting carbon emission reductions may be in excess of 6 million tonnes of CO2 by 2030. ImpactScope will be the exclusive marketing partner for these offsets.
Meanwhile, for team members is Hungary, January was filled with long days and nights double checking hundreds of calculations with local engineers developing a 3-step CO2 sequestration facility consisting of a Direct Air Capture (DAC) device, an algae farm and a biochar factory in Budapest.
Our XPRIZE Carbon Removal Milestone Submission in partnership with Aether Technologies, describes a technology that can remove CO2 from ambient air with a very high energy efficiency. The absorbed CO2 is used to feed microalgae, which are then pyrolised into biochar that is capable of storing carbon for at least several decades. Biochar can be utilised in agriculture, as well as a raw material for construction.
Gregg Betz, ImpactScope co-founder, is bullish about the scalability of the project, “Our forecasts indicate that our prototype will be capable of capturing 1,000t CO2/year, while weighing no more than 6 tonnes. Moreover, we are confident that our innovative technology can be scaled to Megaton and Gigaton levels.”