Elon Musk Funds $100 Million to crowdsource platform XPrize For Pursuit Of New Carbon Removal Ideas. And Elon Musk’s $100 million carbon capture XPrize competition starts today.
Elon Musk took to Twitter on 22nd Jan that he’ll be donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology. And added that details of the competition will announce soon. Read more about Carbon capture Technology here.
On the note of this competition Musk twitted on Feb 8, the prize of $100M will be managed by a crowdsourcing platform XPrize.
XPrize uses large-scale global incentive competitions to crowdsource solutions to the world’s grand challenges. XPrize tweeted about this as the largest in the history fund prize.
Race for carbon capture technology
The race for the prize – the largest in the XPrize’s history – will start on Earth Day and will be hosted till 2025. Winning entries will need to show an ability for their idea to scale up to gigaton levels, a benchmark that refers to a billion metric tons of carbon. For the last several years, the world’s energy-related CO2 emissions have topped 30 gigatons.
In the first 18 months of four years, judges will select the top 15 teams across the world each of which will receive $1 million. Also, $200,000 scholarships will be awarded to 25 separate student teams who enter. The top three teams among the top 15 will receive $10 million, $20 million, and $50 million for the third-, second-place, and grand prize winners, respectively.
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“The world’s leading scientists estimate that we may need to remove as much as 6 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2030. And 10 gigatons per year by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change,”
the XPrize page states.
To qualify for victory, solutions must be able to extract one ton of CO2 per day from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in an environmentally benign way. And be viable in a scaled, validated model at the time of presentation, with the ability to scale it to “gigaton levels” in commercially viable ways in the future. Those are big goals for new technologies, but the competition’s stakes are high. Musk has frequently referred to climate change as an existential threat to humanity, and carbon capture is one key means to combat it.
“We need bold, radical tech innovation and scale-up that goes beyond limiting CO2 emissions. But actually removes CO2 already in the air and oceans. If humanity continues on a business-as-usual path, the global average temperature could increase 6˚(C) by the year 2100.”
To get more details about the competition you can visit here.
