Monday, February 8, 2021

Elon Musk's $100M Carbon Removal Prize Launched On XPRIZE

A competition to come up with a way to rapidly remove excess carbon dioxide from the Earth's atmosphere--with a prize of $100M--has just gone live with the XPRIZE Foundation. The $100M Gigaton Scale Carbon Removal Prize just went live on the XPRIZE site, the largest incentive prize ever offered in history for a competition. The prize--being funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation--challenges teams and innovators to create and demonstrate solutions that cna pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and oceans, ultimately scaling to gigaton levels and locking away CO2 permanently. According to the prize, scientists estimate that we may need to remove as much as 6 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2030, and 10 gigatons per year by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change. XPRIZE said it will provide full details on the competition on Earth Day, April 22nd, with the competition running for four years, until 2025.