Words by Smiley Team
While some are fighting to ensure we reduce the carbon dioxide we emit, others are contemplating a future where we have to take back what we’ve already emitted. Elon Musk falls into the second category. Together with the Musk Foundation, the founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is launching a competition, XPRIZE, to create initiatives to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Accepting entries over four years, from Earth Day 2021 on 22nd April, to 2025, the competition will award the best project with $50 million for its rollout. The second best project will receive $20 million and the third-best will receive $10 million.
The 15 runners up will each win $1 million and a total of twenty-five $200,000 student scholarships will go to student teams competing.
“We want to make a truly meaningful impact,” said Musk. “Carbon negativity, not neutrality. The ultimate goal is scalable carbon extraction that is measured based on the ‘fully considered cost per ton’ which includes the environmental impact. This is not a theoretical competition; we want teams that will build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level. Whatever it takes. Time is of the essence.”
With a goal of restoring the planet’s carbon balance, the competition aims to support initiatives to remove 10 gigatons of carbon per year by 2050.
As founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE, Peter Diamandis is leading the initiative. He said: “We are challenging engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs to build and demonstrate carbon removal systems that work. Systems that in sub-scale can demonstrate real, viable carbon removal at 1 ton per day, and then show us how those systems can scale (cost-effectively) to scale massively to gigaton scale.
“The goal of this competition is to inspire entrepreneurs and engineers to build the carbon dioxide removal solutions, many of which have only been discussed and debated. We want to see them built, tested, and validated.”
If international leaders continue on a business-as-usual path, the global average temperature could increase by 6˚(C) by the year 2100. This is a far and deadly stretch away from the Paris Agreement’s goal of no more than 1.5˚(C) of pre-industrial levels. Anticipating that we might have difficulty reaching these goals, XPRIZE hopes to remove CO2 already in the air and oceans.
The full competition guidelines will be released when it opens for registrations on Earth Day, 22nd April 2021.
For more information visit the XPRIZE web page, where you can sign up for email alerts containing news about the competition.
