The Tesla co-founder Elon Musk has offered a $100m (£73m) fund for inventions that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or oceans.
Musk, who has built up an estimated $203bn fortune, said he wanted scientists to make a “truly meaningful impact” and achieve “carbon negativity, not neutrality”.
“This is not a theoretical competition; we want teams that will build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level,” Musk said as he announced the competition as part of the X Prize charity initiative that encourages technological developments that can benefit humanity. “Whatever it takes. Time is of the essence.”
To win, teams must create “a solution that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in an environmentally benign way”, the X Prize Foundation said.
The foundation, founded in 1997 to encourage technological solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems, said the Musk-sponsored challenge was “the largest incentive prize in history”. The announcement came as Tesla revealed a $1.5bn investment in bitcoin, a virtual currency that has been criticised by environmentalists because it generates CO2 through the sheer amount of computing power it uses.
Fifteen teams from around the world will be selected for the carbon capture competition, which is expected to last four years. The selected teams will receive $1m to help them develop their ideas. The grand prize winner will be awarded $50m, second place will receive $20m, and third place will get $10m. Full competition guidelines will be published on 22 April.
The technology must be able to remove one US ton (2,000lb) of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or ocean per day. The winning team must also demonstrate that the technology can be scaled up to be able to remove gigatons – billions of tons – of carbon dioxide in the future.
The $100m pledged by Musk’s charitable foundation is double the total amount he has given away since setting up the Musk Foundation with his brother in 2002. The charity’s entire website extends to 32 words or 259 characters – less than the limit for one post on Twitter, the medium favoured by Musk.
Btw, critical feedback is always super appreciated, as well as ways to donate money that really make a difference (way harder than it seems)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 8, 2021
Last month, Musk tweeted that he would donate $100m to carbon capture and asked his 46 million Twitter followers for tips on how to give away more of this fortune, complaining that finding the right good causes was “way harder than it seems”.
• This article was amended on 8 February 2021 to remove a description of Elon Musk as Tesla’s founder. Musk is included in the company’s list of co-founders.
