XPrize details Elon Musk’s $100M prize to battle weather change

Past thirty day period, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO and richest individual in the world Elon Musk announced he’d place a compact share of his billions toward “a prize for ideal carbon capture technological innovation.”  On Monday, XPrize announced the wide outline of the opposition.

The nonprofit will operate the contest, which it says will be the greatest incentive prize in record. Groups from everywhere in the world are invited “to create and exhibit a remedy that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away completely in an environmentally benign way,” in accordance to a submit on YouTube.

Carbon capture refers to a large array of mostly nascent systems that can get carbon dioxide from the environment and both store it someplace (underground, for case in point) or convert it into solutions ranging from gas to sun shades.

The aim in this article is to reduce the all round degree of CO2, which is a essential driver of weather modify.

A new site on the XPrize internet site announces the fundamental outline of the level of competition, which will past for 4 many years and require groups to make “a doing the job carbon removing prototype that can be rigorously validated and capable of removing at least a person ton per day.”

Teams will be judged not only on a operating prototype, but also on their system to economically scale the new engineering to the gigaton degree. (Which is a billion tons.)

Scientists estimate we may want to start off removing several gigatons of carbon from the air for each yr to prevent the worst impacts of the weather disaster.

“We want groups to develop genuine methods that can make a measurable impression at a gigaton level. Whichever it can take. Time is of the essence,” Musk explained in a statement.

As with other XPrize competitions, an early round of small prizes will go to university student and nonstudent teams to kickstart their prototype improvement. The remaining $80 million will go to a $50 million grand prize, $20 million for second spot and $10 million for 3rd.

The comprehensive opposition rules will be launched on Earth Working day, April 22.

It can be also worthy of noting that the separate Carbon XPrize is now in its sixth year and looking to finally wrap up in the coming months. Grand prize winners in three classes will get $7.5 million every single.

Musk has supported the XPrize Foundation in the past.

More than the many years, Musk has explained his two key enterprise ventures, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, are motivated by his want to tackle local climate alter and to give a backup program for humanity (on Mars), respectively.

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