Ali Hasan
Elon Musk is all set to giveaway $100 million as prize money in a competition. Elon Musk who is the richest person in the world is donating $100 million as prize money for the “best carbon capture technology”.
He officially tweeted “Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology” and he added that he would provide “details next week”. But his past statements suggest that one of his key goals is to lower the price of direct-air carbon capture so it can feasibly be used to make synthetic rocket fuel, replacing the fossil fuels used now.
Elon Musk will donate 50% of his Wealth
The donation of $100 million as prize money is understandable as in 2012; Musk signed The Giving Pledge, an initiative launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that asks signatories to donate at least half of their wealth within their lifetime. He has primarily donated toward science and engineering education, renewable-energy research, pediatric research, and research into human space exploration.
But an estimate by Forbes in September found that Musk had donated just $100 million – less than 1% of his net worth, which consists mostly of stock in his companies. Still, Musk’s proposed carbon-capture contest would go toward a cause that is likely to play a major role in fighting climate change moving forward, especially under the Biden administration.
President Joe Biden has signed the Paris climate agreement and this might be good news for Elon Musk as they both are aligned when it comes to green energy and the future of humanity. But even with the US re-entering the Paris climate agreement, it won’t be easy for anyone to restore earth’s climate and reduce the carbon footprint anytime soon.
Even if all greenhouse-gas emissions stopped by then, according to the study, at least 33 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide would need to be sucked out of the atmosphere each year using carbon capture – roughly the total amount of carbon dioxide the global fossil-fuel industry emitted in 2018 alone (36 metric gigatons).
Carbon capture is, in fact, a broad mix of technologies with the same aim: collecting carbon dioxide so it doesn’t escape into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. The greenhouse gas can be captured from power plants and factories, or even directly from the air.
The technology is becoming widely accepted as a safe form of geo-engineering compared with other approaches, and Biden voiced support for it in his campaign platform, saying his administration would take steps to “accelerate the development and deployment of carbon-capture sequestration technology.”
Specifically, Biden wants to make carbon capture more widely available, cheaper, and scalable, and he plans to increase federal investments and tax incentives for developing the technology.
In 2017, Elon Musk said: “There isn’t some way to make an electric rocket. I wish there was. But in the long-term, you can use solar power to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere, combine it with water, and produce fuel and oxygen for the rocket.” He brought up the idea again in 2019, when he responded to a question on Twitter about using carbon capture to make rocket fuel, saying “rocket flights will be zero net carbon long-term.”
What Musk is describing is not science fiction. There are at least 3 startups — Canada’s Carbon Engineering, Switzerland’s Climeworks, and the U.S.’s Global Thermostat — that have each built working pilot plants to capture carbon dioxide from the air. Carbon Engineering has even made a small batch of synthetic fuel from CO₂.
The science itself isn’t new. Researchers have been using chemical reactions to convert CO₂ into hydrocarbon fuels for about a century. The difficulty has been lowering the cost of the process and figuring out how to power it with clean energy. Because CO₂ is the end-product of burning fossil fuels, reversing the process requires a huge input of energy.
And while capturing carbon from facilities where burning fossil fuels is not trivial, trying to suck it from the air where concentrations of the gas are very low requires filtering large amounts of the gas for a tiny volume of CO₂. The 3 companies with pilot plants spent tens of millions of dollars to get to this stage, and there’s a long way to go. The cost of securing one ton of carbon using direct air capture can be as high as $600 — about 15 times the price of carbon traded in Europe’s market.
Musk’s $100 million is likely to lead to many times that amount being invested into developing carbon capture technology. That’s something the space desperately needs. Climate models show that some form of negative-emissions technology will be required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, and there’s a limit to how many forests can be planted to naturally absorb CO₂.
“Air is practically an infinite reservoir of CO₂,” said Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh. If there’s a carbon capture technology that deserves such a prize, Haszeldine reckons that direct air capture is the right target.
Musk isn’t the first billionaire to propose a multimillion-dollar carbon capture prize. Richard Branson launched the Virgin Earth Challenge in 2007, offering $25 million for commercially viable machines that can remove significant amounts of CO₂ from the air for at least 10 years. In 2011, finalists were announced but none met the criteria. The Carbon XPrize, started in 2015, currently has 10 finalists vying to convert CO₂ into products. The winner is expected to be announced in 2021.
These past technology prizes can help Musk design his own. His team has to put in considerable effort to map out the technology landscape and future pathways for its use before it launches the competition, said Nesta Challenges’ Dyson. That will help create a clear criterion that’s ambitious but not impossible. The rules have to stay consistent, and small financial rewards for reaching smaller milestones can help teams stay motivated.
Let’s see who wins the $100 million in prize money. If you have the potential to get it, then please apply as soon as the details get in the public domain.
