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Clean Energy is credited with making Elon Musk the richest person in the world by developing electric cars, pushing technology that cuts carbon dioxide emissions and slows global warming, and Musk is now investing $ 100 million. dollars of that wealth in prizes for technologies to remove carbon dioxide. of the atmosphere.
The Xprize Foundation will host the competition, which will be supported by the nonprofit Mask Foundation and founded by the CEO of Tesla with $ 100 million.
“Carbon negativity, not neutrality,” Musk said in a statement. “This is not a theory contest … Whatever the cost, time is running out.”
Competition details
The competition will open on Earth Day, corresponding to April 22, where the prize will be awarded to winning teams on the same day in 2025, provided that three winners are selected for three separate awards for the innovators who help develop the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies.
The first place winner will receive $ 50 million, while the second and third winners will receive $ 20 million and $ 10 million respectively, according to Bloomberg, which was seen by Al-Arabiya.net.
Conventional carbon capture focuses on removing carbon dioxide from the exhaust gases of power plants or factories, then burying the greenhouse gases deep underground to eliminate its contribution to global warming.
Currently, around 0.1% of global emissions are captured and used in most cases by oil producers or heavy industries to achieve carbon neutrality in a limited number of facilities.
But global emission reductions around the world have been delayed for so long that climatologists are now convinced of the need for new technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the air. This is what Musk means by “carbon negativity”.
To bring the planet’s temperature back to 1.5 degrees Celsius, its highest pre-industrial levels, the ratio suggested by the special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in 2018, the world may need to capture and store up to 20 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Air. This is equivalent to half of the current global emissions of carbon dioxide.
The MASIC competition asks the winning teams to present a practical solution to capture up to 1 ton of carbon dioxide per day at the lowest possible cost.
“It’s not just two, three or a group of companies, it’s not just a bunch of solutions and dozens or hundreds of different efforts that we need,” said Marcuse Extavor, executive director of environment at X-Prize Corporation, Marcuse Extavor. “.
A report predicts that annual revenues from decarbonization will reach $ 1.4 trillion by 2050, roughly the same as the oil and gas industry earns today.
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