Elon Musk is investing $ 100 million in a new competition from the X Prize Foundation with a focus on carbon removal technology. The contest, announced on Monday morning, will run for four years and is open to teams from around the world.
Fifteen teams will be selected for the competition in 18 months. Each of them will receive US $ 1 million and 25 separate US $ 200,000 scholarships will be given to teams of students who enter. The grand prize winner will receive $ 50 million, second place will receive $ 20 million and third place will receive $ 10 million.
Winners will have to “demonstrate a solution that can extract carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or the oceans and permanently block it in an environmentally benign way,” according to the X Prize Foundation. Judges will look for solutions that can remove a ton of CO2 a day, which can reach gigatonne levels. The complete competition guidelines will be published on April 22.
“We want to make a truly significant impact. Carbon negativity, not neutrality, ”said Musk in a statement. “This is not a theoretical competition; we want teams that build real systems that can have a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level. Whatever it takes. Time is essential.”
Musk first announced that it was donating money for a prize in January, not long after he overtook Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world. When that happened, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX asked his millions of followers on Twitter “ways to donate money that really make a difference”. The $ 100 million comes from Musk’s own foundation. This donation almost doubles the amount he has donated publicly so far through the Musk Foundation.
Carbon removal technology is an expensive idea that has not yet been proven on a large scale, with options ranging from financing reforestation projects to physically removing greenhouse gas from the air. But it is in fashion as the world heats up. It is especially popular with large companies. Last year, Stripe enabled companies using its payment processing platform to channel part of their earnings towards the development of carbon removal technology.
Perhaps most notably, Microsoft announced in 2020 that it wanted to capture the equivalent of all the carbon dioxide ever emitted. The company pledged $ 1 billion for the effort.
Last month, we took a look at the slight progress Microsoft has made toward that goal. The company has acquired contracts to capture 1.3 million metric tons of CO2, or just 11 percent of its total emissions for 2020 alone.