Musk-funded prize targets greenhouse gas

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — From algae farming to producing a sort of artificial limestone, ideas for reducing greenhouse gas in the atmosphere are getting a funding boost from famed entrepreneur Elon Musk.

The Tesla electric vehicle and SpaceX rocket company developer is bankrolling a $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition for the most promising ways to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide by grabbing the gas right out of the air.

The 15 early-phase “milestone round” winners were announced Friday and each will get $1 million, a welcome boost for the teams to carry on with and scale up their work.

“What we’ve said is you haven’t given us a million bucks; what you’ve done is catalyzed investment in this technology,” said Mike Kelland, CEO of Planetary Technologies, a milestone winner that seeks to increase the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide by controlling the rising acidity of seawater.

The milestone winners aren’t necessarily ahead or favored for the $80 million in final prize money that will be awarded in three years. Until Dec. 1, 2023, anyone can still jump into the contest and potentially get a share of that money.

The final winning team or teams will need to show they can remove 1,100 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, show how much it would cost to remove up to 1.1 million tons per year and show a path to removing billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year.

A third party will independently validate the work submitted for the grand prize, to be announced on April 20, 2025.

XPRIZE announced $5 million in carbon removal project awards to university student teams last fall.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been warning in ever-starker terms of the threat of rising global temperatures.

XPRIZE is a technology promotion organization known in part for a contest that encouraged development of a privately funded, reusable spacecraft in 2004.