Musk announced that he is “donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology.” In an effort to address climate change issue.
The world’s richest man, Tesla CEO and SpaceX boss, Elon Musk finally has plans of saving a planet, and it’s not Mars.
Musk in January in a tweet implied that he finally wants to address climate change – and find a solution to it. Musk announced that he is “donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology.” In an additional tweet he added that there would be details soon.
In a recent tweet, he has revealed more details about the competition. In his tweet he mentioned that the ‘XPrize team will manage the $100M carbon capture prize.’
The $100 million prize will be given away in a four-year global competition to find a way of reducing carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere. “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,” Musk said in a statement on Monday.
Full guidelines will be announced on April 22 and the competition will last for four years through Earth Day, 2025, XPrize, which organized the competition, said on Monday.
Eighteen months into the competition, the top 15 teams will receive $1 million while twenty-five $200,000 student scholarships will also be distributed to the competing student teams.
Following that, the grand prize winner will get $50 million, while the second place holder will get $20 million and $10 million will go to the third place holder, the California-based non-profit organization said.
To win the competition, the teams would have “to create and demonstrate a solution that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in an environmentally benign way,” XPrize added.
Carbon capture in itself is just the act of capturing carbon from the atmosphere. When combined with storage, Carbon capture involves trapping the carbon dioxide at its emission source, transporting it to a storage location (usually deep underground) and isolating it.
After Musk posted the first tweet, several people had pointed out that maybe the easiest way to counter carbon trapping was nature’s own creation: Trees.
Carbon capture has actually been in use for years, even if it hasn’t been for the environment. The oil and gas industries have used carbon capture for decades as a way to enhance oil and gas recovery. Only recently, has thinking about capturing carbon for environmental reasons begun.
Currently, most research focuses on carbon capture at fossil fuel-powered energy plants, the source of the majority of man-made CO2 emissions. Many of these power plants rely on coal to create energy, and the burning of coal emits CO2 into the atmosphere, says a report in How Stuff Works. So to effectively attempt carbon capture, the aim should be at industries and power plants to actively reduce it.
Trees, on the other hand are a great solution but it may not be enough. In June last year, two studies published in the journal Nature Sustainability found that large-scale tree planting is not a simple solution to climate change. One of the two researchers said that new forests may not offer the desired financial incentives and reduce biodiversity. It will also have little impact on carbon emissions.
Originally published at News 18