Elon Musk provides $100 million for XPrize competition to spark huge carbon-removal-technology breakthrough
Updated Feb 09, 2021;
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Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has launched a new XPrize competition, which he says is focused on “fighting climate change and rebalancing earth’s carbon cycle.”
The announcement on the competition’s website gets right to the point: “Largest Incentive Prize in History: $100 million.”
Here’s how you win: invent and successfully demonstrate technology “that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans, ultimately scaling massively to gigaton levels, locking away CO2 permanently in an environmentally benign way.”
Carbon-capture technology has been talked up ever since concerns about climate change entered the public discourse. But while efforts in recent years have produced some small-time successes, the ability to scale it “massively to gigaton levels” has remained nothing but a dream.