Innovator and billionaire Elon Musk announced a $100 million prize fund for inventors who can create solutions to combat planet warming by eliminating carbon dioxide.
XPrize Carbon Removal, funded by Musk and the Musk Foundation and organized by the nonprofit XPrize Foundation, challenges designers to create a system that can extract vast quantities of CO2 directly from the atmosphere or the oceans.
"Right now we've only got one planet," Musk, chief executive of electric carmaker Tesla, Inc., says. "Even a 0.1% chance of disaster - why run that risk? That's crazy!"
The prize fund for the four-year competition will be $100 million, with the overall winner winning $50 million, second receiving $20 million and third place receiving $10 million. This makes it the largest reward, according to the XPrize Foundation.
The ultimate goal of the competition is to create a device capable of removing one gigaton - 1 billion tons -- of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.
"XPrize Carbon Removal is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity - fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth's carbon cycle," the foundation said.
XPRIZE named two winners of a separate $20 million award for developing technologies to convert power plant emissions into concrete. CarbonCure Technologies, based in Canada, is one such company that has received funding from Bill Gates, Amazon.com Inc., and others.
Musk has developed a reputation as an environmentalist industrialist, transforming Tesla into the world's most profitable vehicle business and growing into solar power so consumers can charge their vehicles carbon-free. He discussed the prize with Peter Diamandis, the XPRIZE Foundation's founder and executive chairperson.
Carbon capture and storage has sparked increasing awareness as a warming atmosphere melts glaciers, intensifies tropical storms and causes "sunny day flooding" in a rising number of coastal areas.
Although countries seek to reduce emissions, scientists say carbon removal technology would be critical to reaching the target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
