Musk offers $100M prize for emissions technology

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.

The carbon-removal contest will be administered by the Xprize Foundation, a nonprofit 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 nonprofit founded by the chief executive officer of Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies.

“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 Monday, following an initial announcement by Musk on Twitter on Jan. 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 percent 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 1.5C above pre-industrial 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 metric tons 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 ton 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 tons a year.

“The Xprize team has deep technical experts and have a history of successfully running similar prizes,” said Noah Deich, president of Carbon180, a non-profit focused on carbon removal. “If there’s a way to get entrepreneurs, who might otherwise try and tackle problems less relevant to the fate of civilization, then Xprize is really well suited to that challenge.”

According to contest officials, the carbon-removal competition is likely to have four tracks—air, land, oceans, and rocks—that focus on different routes technologies can take to achieve CDR. Some of these pathways are already occupied by startups. There are at least three companies with air purifier-like machines that filter and trap CO2: Canada’s Carbon Engineering, the Swiss company Climeworks, and Global Thermostat based in the U.S. So far, these three have built pilot plants that can, at best, capture thousands of tons of CO2 each year.

The prize might spur startups to pursue other viable routes. Oceans dissolve much of the CO2 that human activity releases, for instance, and scientists have started developing ideas for capturing the dissolved gas held in the water. It’s also possible to use crushed minerals on farmland that speed up the process of trapping CO2 that would have otherwise happened much too slowly naturally.

“It’s not two or three solutions or a handful of companies, it’s probably a handful of solution types and dozens or hundreds of different efforts that we need,” said Marcius Extavour at Xprize. “We need a whole industry doing carbon removal.”