15 winners of Musk-backed XPrize carbon challenge revealed
The Musk Foundation-backed XPrize has revealed 15 milestone winners in its $100 million Carbon Removal competition with each team receiving $1 million to support the scaling up of their technologies.
The XPrize Carbon Removal competition was launched in January 2021 to encourage innovations in carbon removal.
Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, the $100 million (€93 million) XPrize claims to be the largest incentive prize in history.
The 15 teams, representing Australia, Canada, France, Iceland, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States, are all still eligible to compete and win the grand prize. The overall winners will be awarded $80 million (€74.5 million) in 2025.
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The competing teams are pursuing a range of solutions, both new and established, with any of them eligible for competition so long as it actually works, achieves net negative emissions, sequesters carbon dioxide durably over at least 100 years, and shows a sustainable path to ultimately achieving gigatonne scale.
The XPrize submission process was designed to be demanding, with the initial 1,133 teams, narrowed down to 287 teams that met the criteria. Proposals were then screened and ranked by 70 experts, who chose the top 60 teams.
The judges then took a deeper dive into the proposals' operations plans, performance data, life cycle analyses, and budgets, ultimately whittling down the number to the 15 $1 million milestone award winners.
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"One year in, we already see the positive impact of the prize: hundreds of groups working on a wide range of promising carbon removal solutions. Not just ideas, but development and deployment plans, which is exactly what we need.
"The pace and depth of initiatives in carbon removal and other crucial climate solutions has never been greater, but we still need more—more and deeper emissions cuts, and more reliable, validated carbon removal solutions. That’s why we launched this prize in the first place,” said Dr Marcius Extavour, chief scientist and vice president of climate and environment at XPRIZE.
The 15 milestone winners include:
- Calcite from 8 Rivers Capital - US
- Carbyon - Netherlands
- Heirloom and Carbfix - US and Iceland
- Project Hajar - UK
- Sustaera - US
- Verdox and Carbfix - US and Iceland
- Bioeconomy Institute Carbon Removal Team from Iowa State, US
- Global Algae Innovations - US
- NetZero - France
- PlantVillage from Penn State, US
- Takachar & Safi Organics from University of British Columbia, Canada, and Kenya
- Captura from California Institute of Technology, US
- Marine Permaculture SeaForestation from the Climate Foundation US, the Philippines and Australia
- Planetary - Canada
- Carbin Minerals from University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
The Carbon Removal competition will now reset ahead of the awarding of the $80 million grand prize, set for 2025. Any team is eligible, regardless of whether they participated in this milestone round or not.
Teams interested in joining the competition can register here, with registration closing on 1 December, 2023.
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To win the grand prize, teams must demonstrate a working solution at a scale of at least 1,000 tonnes of carbon removed per year, model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year, and show a pathway to achieving a scale of gigatonnes per year in future. All solutions must be validated by a third party.
The Grand Prize winner and runners up will be announced on Earth Day 2025.
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