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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is keeping his promise to deliver $ 100 million for the best carbon capture technology through a new XPRIZE challenge.
Carbon capture, also known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), is a process of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) at the emission source and sequestering it so that it does not leak into the environment. the air.
It also sometimes involves technologies to use the carbon for other purposes.
The concept has been suggested as a potential solution to slow climate change by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere or even reversing it in the future.
However, current carbon capture technologies have often proven to be inefficient and increase the cost of power generation, making it uncompetitive without a carbon price. In fact, the only carbon capture plant in the United States has just closed.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said last month he would donate $ 100 million to help develop the best carbon capture technology.
The competition will be via XPRIZE
XPRIZE, a non-profit organization that designs and hosts public contests designed to encourage technological development for the benefit of humanity, will host the contest.
They confirmed that the $ 100 million in prizes donated by Musk were the biggest wallets to date:
XPRIZE Carbon Removal aims to tackle the greatest threat to humanity: tackling climate change and rebalancing the earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $ 100 million contest is the largest incentive prize in history – an extraordinary milestone.
Full details of the competition won’t be revealed until Earth Day, April 22, 2021, but they have released broader guidelines nonetheless.
They wrote on a new webpage for the contest:
To win the competition, teams must demonstrate a rigorous and validated scale model of their carbon removal solution, and additionally must demonstrate to a team of judges the ability of their solution to scale economically to levels. gigatons. The goal of this XPRIZE is to inspire and help scale up effective solutions to collectively meet the goal of 10 gigatonnes per year of carbon removal by 2050, to help fight the climate change and restore the Earth’s carbon footprint.
Musk commented on the competition announcement:
We want teams to build real systems that can have a measurable impact on a gigaton level. Everything that’s necessary. Time is the essence.
As usual, XPRIZE tries to distribute the prizes in the most optimal way to help develop as many useful technologies as possible.
The competition will run for up to four years, but after 18 months, 15 finalists will be awarded $ 1 million each to kickstart their operating budget to present a full-scale demonstration of their carbon capture technology.
In the end, a grand prize winner will receive $ 50 million, and second and third place finishers will receive $ 20 million and $ 10 million, respectively.
In addition, 25 students will receive scholarships of $ 200,000.
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