Tesla's boss, Elon Musk has joined XPrize's chairman Peter Diamandis to announce a $100 million carbon removal competition. The ideal of the competition is to encourage innovators across the world to come up with large scale projects that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and oceans and sequester it sustainably and durably. The announcement of the 4-year competition happened last Thursday on the occasion of world earth day.
To win this competition, the teams have to prove that they can remove 1000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. They have to model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year and then demonstrate a model where that scales to 1 giga-tonne per year in the future.
This initiative is being backed by Musk and his foundation and any solution that's carbon negative in nature will be considered. In the first year itself, the judges will review the entries and award up to 15 with $1 million each. After four years, the judges will select one grand prize winner who will win $50 million. There will be three runners-up who will get $30 million each.
Before Tesla and SpaceX, Musk the co-founder of PayPal with Peter Thiel
This shouldn't be a massive amount for Musk who is the world's second-richest man, backed by the success of Tesla and SpaceX. He is worth $179 billion as of writing this, though a couple of months ago for a very short while he usurped Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world. While this is a couple of days old, looks like people in India are starting to wake up to this now that it is trending on Google.
