WASHINGTON – How much would it take to encourage the world’s most astute engineers and entrepreneurs to develop elusive technology capable of sucking gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the air and oceans?
Billionaire technology entrepreneur Elon Musk is betting on $ 100 million, according to details released on Monday about a four-year contest he is funding to develop carbon removal technologies. Competitors will not only have to build functional prototypes that measurably remove carbon, but they will also have to prove that they can economically scale them to a level that exceeds anything that has been built before.
If the contest is successful, organizers say, it will spur a host of new technologies that together would remove 10 gigatonnes of carbon from the planet each year in the middle of the century – almost a third of the carbon that human energy uses to pump air. every year.
“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,” said Musk when announcing the award requirements. “Whatever it takes. Time is of the essence.”
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Musk, the Tesla CEO who built much of his fortune by revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry, released the $ 100 million prize last month in a tweet saying he was donating the amount to a prize “for the best carbon capture technology “. The first details were released on Monday by the XPRIZE Foundation, a non-profit organization that has held other contests to encourage technological advances and will oversee the contest, sponsored by Musk and his foundation.
Starting on Earth Day, April 22, the contest will last four years. The top 15 teams will be selected after the first 18 months and will receive $ 1 million, helping to finance their operations as they work to build operational models. At the end of the four years, a $ 50 million first place prize will be awarded, with second place taking $ 20 million and the third best prize taking home $ 10 million. In addition, 25 scholarships worth $ 200,000 will be awarded to competing academic teams.
Participants must build “rigorously validated” work prototypes that remove at least 1 ton of carbon per day. The teams will be evaluated for evidence that their solutions can be extended “down to the level of gigatonnes”. To find economical solutions in a notoriously expensive field, inputs will also be judged by the cost per tonne of carbon removed, as well as how long the carbon removed remains trapped, with a goal of at least 100 years.
While most efforts to address climate change have focused on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the potential to safely remove and store carbon that has already been released has emerged for years as another potentially useful tool. promising to limit global warming.
The carbon capture technologies developed so far have been extraordinarily expensive, used mainly to reduce or zero emissions at specific energy production facilities and only at smaller scales. President Joe Biden, who has proposed spending $ 2 trillion on climate change investments, has pledged as a candidate to “double federal investment and increase tax incentives” specifically for carbon capture and sequestration technologies.
“$ 100 million can really move the needle if applied tactically,” said Noah Deich, president of Carbon180, a nonprofit organization that promotes carbon removal as a climate strategy. “Investors don’t want to take market and technology risks. If they can demonstrate that the technology works and use essentially philanthropic money to do that, many people want to invest a lot of capital. ”
Contest organizers said they expected a range of types of carbon technology to be reflected in the entries, including engineering solutions like direct air capture, in which chemical processes separate carbon from air and store it. They said they also expect inputs based on mineralization and better weathering, as well as natural solutions, such as those that depend on trees, plants or the ocean to remove carbon.
