InnoTech Alberta celebrates with XPRIZE

NEWS RELEASE

(Calgary, Alberta) April 19, 2021 – InnoTech Alberta, a subsidiary of Alberta Innovates, congratulates CarbonCure on winning the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE competition. CarbonCure successfully demonstrated they could remove carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by the Shepard Energy Centre and use it to create concrete. InnoTech Alberta hosted the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE at the Alberta Carbon Conversion Technology Centre (ACCTC), adjacent to the Shepard Energy Centre, on the eastern edge of Calgary’s city limits.

The ACCTC’s legacy will continue beyond the completion of the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE. New and continuing clients will use the platform to develop, validate and pilot technologies that target carbon capture and utilization. The NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE competition demonstrates the positive impact of this unique facility and carbon utilization technologies.

The Centre will continue to contribute to economic growth in Alberta as it attracts entrepreneurs and industry conducting research and development leading to commercially viable projects and attracting new business from Alberta and beyond.

QUOTES

“We celebrate with InnoTech Alberta and the partnerships and research to support our own carbon capture and utilization and storage strategy. We look forward to the ongoing economic benefits and emissions reduction that flow from these companies.”

Hon. Doug Schweitzer, Minister of Jobs, Economy, and Innovation

“Our subsidiary, Innotech Alberta, has industry knowledge and expertise to support these projects and host the COSIA NRG Carbon XPRIZE contestants at the Alberta Carbon Conversion Technology Centre. These companies are modern alchemists who are converting carbon emissions from liability into valued products instead. Congratulations to the winners and all the teams. They are pioneers in the carbon-tech sector and leading the way to greater opportunities as we move to a net-zero world.”

Laura Kilcrease, CEO, Alberta Innovates

BACKGROUND

The NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE inspires development of new carbon dioxide (CO2) conversion technologies to help solve climate change. The US$20 million XPRIZE is a global competition to develop breakthrough technologies that will convert CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial facilities into valuable products like building materials, alternative fuels and other items we use every day. The competition is run by the XPRIZE Foundation, in partnership with NRG and Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA).

The winning teams successfully demonstrated how they could convert the most CO2 into products with the highest value, while minimizing their overall CO2 footprint, land use, water use, and energy use.

Competitors at the Alberta Carbon Conversion Technology Centre include:

• Air Company: Air Company has discovered a way to transform CO2 into alcohol.
• CarbonCure: CarbonCure has built a carbon removal technology that adds CO2 into concrete production to improve concrete performance and permanently embed CO2 emissions.
• Carbon Upcycling-NLT (CUT): Carbon Upcycling is working with newlight technologies to transform the waste carbon emissions of today into the building materials of tomorrow.
• CERT: CERT made breakthroughs with their technology that transforms CO2 into ethylene, the foundation for countless consumer products.
• Carbon Corp (C2CNT): Carbon Corp converts CO2 into “carbon nanotubes,” products with remarkable properties of conductivity, nanoelectronics, higher capacity batteries, flexibility, with greater strength than steel and widespread use as carbon composites.

Three of the five competitors will remain at the ACCTC to continue to develop and refine their technologies. Carbon Corp. and Carbon Upcycling Technologies will continue their work at the Centre, and New York based Air Company will also continue their work by establishing a team at the ACCTC site.

Alberta Carbon Conversion Technology Centre (ACCTC)
The ACCTC is a unique facility built to demonstrate carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and conversion technologies. Owned and operated by InnoTech, the ACCTC enables users to test and advance CO2 capture and conversion technologies that assist in greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions, by enabling the conversion of CO2 into commercially viable, value-added products. The development and future use of the Centre will extend beyond the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE competition. It is open for use by other technology developers and industrial clients seeking to validate their technologies to derive value from them or enhance the emissions profiles of their organizations.

View of a video of the ACCTC

InnoTech Alberta
InnoTech Alberta is a leading research and technology organization serving the needs of industry, entrepreneurs and the public sector. Our leading-edge expertise and industrial-scale research and demonstration facilities accelerate and de-risk technology development and deployment with a focus on industrial solutions and commercial application. We are Alberta’s innovation engine with 100 years of bold ideas that feed, grow, fuel, and build Alberta’s agriculture, energy, environment, and forestry sectors. Visit us at: InnoTechAlberta.ca

XPRIZE
XPRIZE, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, is the global leader in designing and implementing innovative competition models to solve the world’s grandest challenges. Active competitions include the $20 Million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, the $10 Million Rainforest XPRIZE, the $10 Million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, the $5 Million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling, $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing, and $500K Pandemic Response Challenge. For more information, visit xprize.org

COSIA
Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) is a unique alliance of oil sands producers focused on accelerating environmental performance in Canada’s oil sands. COSIA enables collaboration and innovation between thinkers from industry, government, academia and the wider public to improve measurement, accountability and performance in the oil sands across our environmental priority areas of greenhouse gases, land, water and tailings. COSIA members search the world for solutions to our toughest problems. And we have some of the best minds on the planet working on technologies to enable further responsible and sustainable development.
Visit COSIA at COSIA.ca. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

CarbonCure
Architects, structural engineers, owners and developers are seeking proven ways to reduce the embodied carbon of their building projects. Recognizing concrete as a solution, CarbonCure Technologies, a fast-growing, clean tech company, has developed an easy-to-adopt technology that enables concrete producers to use captured carbon dioxide to produce reliable, low-carbon concrete mixes and achieve market differentiation. Available from hundreds of concrete plants, more than one million truckloads of CarbonCure-based mixes have supplied a wide range of sustainable construction projects around the world. CarbonCure’s investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Amazon, BDC Capital, Pangaea, Microsoft, 2150, Carbon Direct, GreenSoil Investments, Taronga Group, and Mitsubishi Corporation.