Elon Musk Pledges $100m Grant for Gigation Scale Carbon Removal Contest

Telsa co-founder Elon Musk pledges $100 million fund for innovations that would help remove carbon dioxide from the air or ocean. The world tycoon is seeking to finance teams with the ability to make substantial impact in the fight against climate change and rebalance world’s carbon cycle.

While making the announcement, Musk said: “This is not a theoretical competition; we want teams that will build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigation level.” The teams should be able to develop a solution that can eradicate “carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away enduringly in an ecologically gentle way,” stated the X Prize Foundation.

The announcement came in the wake of Tesla’s revelation about $1.5 billion investment in bitcoin. The fund will benefit 15 teams to be selected from the “Carbon Capture Competition.” $50 million award will go to the grand prize winner, $20 million will be for the second best team and the third ranked will get $10 million.

The winning team must be able to elaborate how the technology can be upgraded to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide in the foreseeable future. The grant is the biggest to be pledged by the Musk Charitable Foundation since its inception in 2002.

According to X Prize Foundation, top scientists estimate that we need to remove more than 6 gigations of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2030 and 10 gigations by 2050 to avert climate crisis.

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