WASHINGTON – How much would the world’s smartest engineers and entrepreneurs encourage to develop evasive technologies that can suck gigaton tons of carbon dioxide from the air and the ocean?
Elon Musk, the billionaire technology entrepreneur, is betting $ 100 million, according to the details released on Monday about a four-year contest he funded to develop carbon removal technologies. Participants will not only have to build working prototypes that can measurably remove carbon, but they must also prove that they can scale it down cost-effectively to a level that surpasses anything ever built before.
If the game is successful, organizers say, it will spur a series of new technologies that will collectively remove ten gigatons of carbon a year from the planet by the middle of the century – nearly a third of the carbon consumed by human energy air every year.
“This is not a theoretical competition. We want teams that will build real-world systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level,” Musk said in announcing the pricing requirements. “Whatever it costs. Time is of the essence.”
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Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who built up a large part of his fortune by revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry, teased the $ 100 million price last month in a tweet, saying he donated the amount to an award ‘for the best carbon capture technology’. The first details were announced Monday by XPRIZE Foundation, a non-profit organization that has held other contests to encourage technological leaps and will oversee the contest, sponsored by Musk and its foundation.
The match ends on April 22 on Earth Day and lasts four years. The top 15 teams will be selected after the first 18 months and will receive $ 1 million to fund their operations while they work to build industry models. At the end of the four years, a first prize of $ 50 million is awarded, with the second place $ 20 million and the third best entry $ 10 million. In addition, 25 scholarships worth $ 200,000 will be awarded to competing academic teams.
Participants must build “strictly validated” working prototypes that remove at least 1 ton of carbon per day. The teams will be judged on whether they have proven that their solutions can be increased “up to the gigaton level”. To find economical solutions in a notoriously expensive field, the entries will also be judged on the cost per tonne of carbon removed, as well as how long the carbon they remove remains confined, with a goal of at least 100 years .
Although most efforts to address climate change have focused on reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, the potential to remove and safely store already released carbon has another promising tool to address the to limit global warming.
Carbon capture technologies developed so far have been extremely expensive and are mainly used to reduce or reduce emissions at specific energy production facilities, and only on a smaller scale. President Joe Biden, who proposed spending $ 2 billion on climate change investments, promised as a candidate to “double federal investment and improve tax incentives” specifically for carbon sequestration and sequestration.
“$ 100 million can really move the needle if applied tactically,” said Noah Deich, president of Carbon180. A non-profit organization that promotes the removal of carbon as a climate strategy. “Investors do not want to take the market and technology risk. If they can demonstrate that the technology works and essentially use philanthropic money to do so, there are many people who want to use a lot of capital.”
The organizers of the contest said they expect a variety of carbon technologies to be reflected in the entries, including designed solutions such as direct air collection, in which chemical processes separate and store carbon from the air. They said they also expect entries based on mineralization and improved weathering, as well as natural solutions, such as those that rely on trees, plants or the ocean to remove carbon.
