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<\/a><\/p>\nEmissions Pathways<\/strong><\/p>\n Teams entering the Xprize competition to win a portion of Musk\u2019s $100 million will have to demonstrate a method for capturing as much as 1 ton of CO\u2082 per day as cheaply as possible, while proving to judges that the technology can be scaled up to remove as much as 1 billion tons a year.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Xprize team has deep technical experts and have a history of successfully running similar prizes,\u201d said Noah Deich, president of Carbon180, a non-profit focused on carbon removal. \u201cIf there\u2019s a way to get entrepreneurs, who might otherwise try and tackle problems less relevant to the fate of civilization, then Xprize is really well suited to that challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n According to contest officials, the carbon-removal competition is likely to have four tracks\u2014air, land, oceans, and rocks\u2014that focus on different routes technologies can take to achieve CDR. Some of these pathways are already occupied by startups.<\/p>\n There are at least three companies with air purifier-like machines that filter and trap CO\u2082: Canada\u2019s Carbon Engineering, the Swiss company Climeworks, and Global Thermostat based in the US. So far, these three existing startups have built pilot plants that can, at best, capture thousands of tons of CO\u2082 each year.<\/p>\n The prize might spur startups to pursue other viable routes. Oceans naturally dissolve much of the CO\u2082 that human activity releases, for instance, and scientists have started developing ideas for capturing the dissolved gas held in the water.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also possible to use crushed minerals on farmland that speed up the process of trapping CO\u2082 that would have otherwise happened much too slowly naturally.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not two or three solutions or a handful of companies, it\u2019s probably a handful of solution types and dozens or hundreds of different efforts that we need,\u201d said Marcius Extavour, executive director of environment at Xprize. \u201cWe need a whole industry doing carbon removal.\u201d<\/p>\n If the world gets serious about demand for carbon removal, a study published in 2020 suggested that the emerging industry could come to rival the size of modern fossil-fuel production. Annual revenues from carbon removal could reach as much as $1.4 trillion by 2050\u2014about the same as the oil and gas sector earns today.<\/p>\n The easiest solution for CDR appears to be planting more trees, but that approach also presents a number of problems. The carbon-offsets industry that has capitalized on the idea has been found to often fall short of delivering verifiable CO\u2082 removal over a long duration.<\/p>\n Any nature-based solutions entering the competition for Musk\u2019s prize money will have to show that carbon can stay trapped for 100 years or more, according to Extavour.<\/p>\n Carbon Pollution Costs Are Likely to Rise Again in Europe<\/strong><\/p>\n The idea of technology prizes goes back at least 300 years, when the U.K. government offered rewards for developing practical methods to determine the precise longitude of ships at sea.<\/p>\n That pursuit saw daring spirits invest in some cases much more money than the reward offered, turning the prize into a pathway to win fame and accolades more than cash.<\/p>\n That\u2019s likely the same strategy behind the modern-day version, particularly given the cost of deploying carbon capture at scale. For example, Carbon Engineering Ltd. is looking to scale its direct air capture technology with Occidental Petroleum Corp.<\/p>\n The first large-scale plant will capture about 1 million tons of CO\u2082 each year, but will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and spend just as much on annual operating costs.<\/p>\n Xprize is currently in the final stages of a separate competition that is looking to further develop conventional carbon capture technology and find ways to put the CO\u2082 to use in valuable products, such as synthetic fuel or advanced materials like carbon fiber.<\/p>\n A total of 48 teams entered the competition and nine remain in the final round, with two prizes worth $10 million each to be handed out later this year.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been very difficult to raise capital in\u201d carbon capture, said Extavour. \u201cWhen we started five years ago, the questions from investors were: Is this real? Does it actually work? These carbon-management solutions were not really mainstream in the climate-intervention conversation then.\u201d<\/p>\n Until now, major oil companies that have the expertise to manage gases at large scale have held back from investing a lot in the technology, which is expensive and the price on carbon has rarely been enough to make it a profitable endeavor.<\/p>\n That\u2019s starting to change as investors demand companies improve their environmental reputations. In January, Exxon Mobil Corp. promised to spend $3 billion over the next five years on carbon capture plants.<\/p>\n Even though the prize money comes from Musk\u2019s philanthropy, he may benefit from carbon-removal technologies becoming cheaper. SpaceX\u2019s rocket fuel is currently carbon based, and the company has applied for licenses to drill for natural gas near its launch site in Texas.<\/p>\n Musk, who has come under criticism for SpaceX\u2019s carbon footprint, imagines a future with carbon-neutral rocket fuel.<\/p>\n \u201cRocket flights will be zero net carbon long-term,\u201d the SpaceX chief tweeted in 2019. He has also said that he would like to one day \u201cuse solar power to extract CO\u2082 from the atmosphere, combine it with water, and produce fuel and oxygen\u201d for his rockets. That would only be economical if the cost of carbon-removal technologies falls substantially.<\/p>\n
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