Musk offers $100 mn prize for removing CO2 from air
Elon Musk became the richest person in the world by dramatically improving electric vehicles, pushing forward a technology that reduces carbon-dioxide emissions and slows global warming. Now he's putting $100 million of that fortune into prizes for technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere itself.
The carbon-removal contest will be administered by the Xprize Foundation, a non-profit group that's held competitions to spur technology development to improve space travel, food and health. The new prize, the largest of its kind, will be backed by a donation from the Musk Foundation, a non-profit founded by the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
"Carbon negativity, not neutrality," Musk said in a statement. "This is not a theoretical competition… Whatever it takes. Time is of the essence."
Details of the $100 million prize for innovators who aid the development of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies were released on Monday, following an initial announcement by Musk on Twitter on January 21. Entries for the prize will open on Earth Day, celebrated on April 22. Three winners will be named for three separate prizes-$50 million, $20 million and $10 million-on the same day in 2025.
Conventional carbon capture focuses on removing CO2 from the exhaust of power plants or factories, then burying the greenhouse gas deep underground to eliminate its contribution to global warming. Today this technology captures about 0.1 per cent of global emissions and it is used in most cases by oil producers or heavy industry to, in effect, achieve carbon neutrality at a limited number of facilities. But overall reductions in worldwide emissions have been delayed for so long that climate scientists are now convinced of the need for newer technologies that remove CO2 from the air. That's what Musk means by "carbon negativity."
Scientists are clear that the world needs to first reduce emissions. But if climate change is to be limited to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, as proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's special report published in 2018, then the world may also need to capture and store as much as 20 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air. That's as much as half of current global CO2 emissions. The 1.5°C threshold is the more ambitious goal under the Paris Agreement, which all countries in the world signed five years ago.
Teams entering the Xprize competition to win a portion of Musk's $100 million will have to demonstrate a method for capturing as much as 1 tonne of CO2 per day as cheaply as possible, while proving to judges that the technology can be scaled up to remove as much as 1 billion tonnes a year.