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WASHINGTON – How much would it take to inspire the world’s smartest engineers and entrepreneurs to develop elusive technology capable of sucking gigatons of carbon dioxide trapping heat from the air and the oceans?
Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is betting it’s $ 100 million, according to details released Monday about a four-year competition he’s funding to develop carbon removal technologies. Not only will competitors have to build working prototypes that measurably remove carbon, but they will also have to prove that they can cost-effectively scale them to a level that exceeds anything ever built before.
If the competition is successful, say organizers, it would spur an array of new technologies that, taken together, would remove 10 gigatonnes of carbon from the planet per year by mid-century – nearly a third of carbon as energy. human pumps through the air every year.
“This is not a theoretical competition. We want teams that will build real systems that can have a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level,” Musk said of announcing the award requirements. “Whatever it takes. Time is running out.”
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Musk, the CEO of Tesla who built much of his fortune revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry, teased the $ 100 million price tag last month in a tweet saying he was donating the money for a “best carbon capture technology” award. The first details were released Monday by the XPRIZE Foundation, a non-profit organization that has held other contests to encourage technological leaps and will oversee the contest, sponsored by Musk and his foundation.
Kicking off Earth Day on April 22, the competition will run for four years. The top 15 teams will be selected after the first 18 months and will be awarded $ 1 million, helping to fund their operations while they work on building operational models. At the end of the four years, a top prize of $ 50 million will be awarded, with second place winning $ 20 million and third best entry winning $ 10 million. In addition, 25 scholarships worth $ 200,000 will be awarded to competing university teams.
Participants must build “rigorously validated” working prototypes that remove at least 1 ton of carbon per day. Teams will be judged if they have proven that their solutions can be scaled “at the gigaton level”. To find cost-effective solutions in a notoriously expensive area, entries will also be judged on the cost per tonne of carbon removed, as well as the length of time the carbon they remove remains stuck, with a target of at least 100 years. .
While most efforts to tackle climate change have focused on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the potential to remove and safely store carbon already released. has been emerging for years as another potentially promising tool to limit global warming.
The carbon capture technologies developed so far have been extremely expensive, used primarily to reduce or eliminate emissions at specific power generation facilities and only at smaller scales. President Joe Biden, who has proposed spending $ 2 trillion on climate change investments, pledged as a candidate to “double federal investments and improve tax incentives” specifically for capture and capture technologies. carbon sequestration.
“$ 100 million can really make a difference if it’s applied tactically,” said Noah Deich, president of Carbon180, a nonprofit that promotes carbon elimination as a climate strategy. “Investors don’t want to take market and technology risks. If they can demonstrate that the technology works and basically use philanthropic money to do it, there are a lot of people who want to deploy a lot of capital. . “
Contest organizers said they expected a range of types of carbon technology to be reflected in the entries, including technical solutions such as direct air capture, in which chemical processes separate carbon from air and store it. They said they also expected inputs based on mineralization and enhanced weathering, as well as natural solutions, such as those that rely on trees, plants or the ocean to remove carbon.
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