Tesla Inc boss and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who is also head of rocket company SpaceX has put out an offer of a $100 million prize in a four-year global competition to discover a way of reducing carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere. Musk, had earlier on in January tweeted about the prize and had said he would reveal details of the competition at a later date. The billionaire, in a statement on Monday, said full guidelines will be announced on April 22 and the competition will last for a period of four years through Earth Day, 2025, organized by XPrize, a California-based non-profit organization.
“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 revealed.
The top 15 teams will receive $1 million eighteen months into the competition, while twenty-five $200,000 student scholarships will also be distributed to the competing student teams.
Subsequently, the grand prize winner will receive $50 million, while the second place holder will get $20 million and $10 million will go to the third place holder, XPrize said.
To win the competition, the teams would have “to create and demonstrate a solution that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in an environmentally benign way,” XPrize added.
Reuters