Elon Musk has come good on his claim of donating $100m to a carbon capture technology competition and, as expected, it is being run in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation. The XPRIZE Carbon Removal contest is aimed at finding solutions that will help humanity to tackle climate change. The $100m prize purse is claimed to be the largest incentive prize in history.
Founded in 1994, the XPRIZE Foundation runs ambitious competitions for finding "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity." Past contests have included the Ansari XPRIZE for designing a reliable, reusable, privately-financed, crewed spaceship for lowering the risk and cost of going to space, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XCHALLENGE for improving crude oil clean up from the ocean’s surface, and the ongoing IBM Watson AI XPRIZE for demonstrating how humans can work with AI to tackle global challenges. It's no hyperbole to say that the carbon removal competition may be the most important that the XPRIZE foundation has ever run.
It's hoped that XPRIZE Carbon Removal will inspire teams to conceive of solutions that can be scaled to gigaton levels of annual carbon removal from the atmosphere or oceans. The competition description suggests "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." Teams will have four years to create and demonstrate solutions.
XPRIZE Carbon Removal Solutions
Team registration will open along with the release of the full competition guidelines on Earth Day, April 22nd 2021, with the contest closing on Earth Day 2025. Team must not only demonstrate a working model of their solution, but the ability to scale it economically to the levels required. Any sort of carbon capture solution will be eligible, with nature-based, direct air capture, ocean, and mineralization-based concepts given as examples. Entries will be evaluated across criteria including how much CO2 they can capture, life cycle analysis of the removal process, energy efficiency, land footprint, and sequestration capabilities.
Speaking about the competition, Elon Musk was quoted as saying, "We want teams to build real systems that can make a measurable impact at a gigaton level. Whatever it takes. Time is of the essence." Musk's initial announcement came shortly before it emerged that SpaceX would begin drilling for natural gas in Texas, which some naturally felt was at odds with the spirit of any such competition and was perhaps more of a PR stunt. It could be argued, though, that the two are not mutually exclusive and that both are currently necessary. It's certainly true that $100m goes beyond usual PR stunt price-tags and if technology with a serious potential for carbon capture on the required global scale comes out of this competition it will be well worth the trade-off.
Source: XPRIZE