Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Elon Musk funds US$100 million to fight climate change in XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 9 -- XPRIZE, the world’s leader in designing and launching incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, has announced the US$100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal sponsored by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation. (US$1 = RM4.057)

This four-year global competition invites worldwide innovators and teams 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.

“We want to make a truly meaningful impact. 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,” said Tesla and SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk.

Meanwhile, XPRIZE Founder and Executive Chairman, Peter H. Diamandis said: “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.”

To win the competition, teams must demonstrate a rigorous, validated scale model of their solution at a level of carbon removal of one ton of CO2 per day, and further must demonstrate to a team of judges the ability of their solution to economically scale to gigaton levels.

The objective of this XPRIZE is to inspire and help scale efficient solutions to collectively achieve the 10 gigaton per year carbon removal target by 2050, to help fight climate change and restore the Earth’s carbon balance.

The full competition guidelines will be announced on April 22, which is also Earth Day. On that same day, team registration will begin. The competition will last for four years through Earth Day 2025.

More details at XPRIZE.org/prizes/elonmusk.

-- BERNAMA

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