The Musk Foundation has launched the $100 million Xprize carbon removal competition for solutions to remove 1 tonne of CO 2 a day.
The Musk Foundation has launched the $100 million Xprize carbon removal competition for solutions to remove 1 tonne of CO2 a day.
The four-year contest invites innovators to create and demonstrate a solution that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in an ‘environmentally benign way’.
Winners must demonstrate a rigorous, validated scale model of their solution and further demonstrate to the judges that their solution can be economically scaled to gigaton levels. The objective of the competition is to help scale efficient solutions to collectively achieve a 10 gigaton per year carbon removal target by 2050.
The full competition guidelines will be announced on 22 April, which is when team registrations will begin, and the contest will last until Earth Day 2025. After 18 months the 15 top teams selected will receive $1 million each. Milestone awards will kickstart team fundraising for their operating budgets to achieve the full-scale demonstrations required to win the prize.
In the same timeframe, a total of 25 $200,000 student scholarships will be distributed to student teams competing. The remaining $80 million in purses will be given to the winner ($50 million), second place ($20 million), and third place ($10 million).
‘We want to make a truly meaningful impact,’ Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, said. ‘The ultimate goal is scalable carbon extraction that is measured based on the fully considered cost per tonne which includes the environmental impact. Whatever it takes. Time is of the essence,’ Musk added.
Peter H. Diamandis, founder and executive chairman of Xprize, said: ‘We are challenging engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs to build and demonstrate carbon removal systems that work. We hope this Xprize will activate the public and private sectors to get involved in the same way that the £10 million Ansari Xprize brought about the commercial spaceflight industry,’ he added.
On 21 January Musk announced on Twitter that he was donating $100 million towards a prize for the best carbon capture technology.
Xprize is a nonprofit organization, which describes itself as the global leader in designing and implementing innovative competition models to solve the world’s grandest challenges.
