How to apply and win Elon Musk’s $100M carbon capture technology prize

Recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that he is donating $100M for innovating the best carbon capture technology. At the time, it was just an announcement, now further details have surfaced including how to apply and, if you're good, win the prize.

Above: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (Source: XPRIZE)

It turns out that the Musk Foundation has selected XPRIZE to manage this process. XPRIZE will open registrations for this competition starting on Earth Day (April 22, 2021) and the competition will run continuously for four years to find the best carbon capture solution.

Currently, XPRIZE is only taking the email addresses of interested persons or companies on the organization’s website which will keep you updated with the latest and, in turn, notify you as soon as the application date arrives.

The XPRIZE web page explains Elon Musk’s $100M donation details and a number of key points which can serve to help a team (or individual) ultimately win the prize.

Above: Elon Musk has put forth the largest incentive prize in human history to combat climate change via carbon removal solutions (YouTube: XPRIZE) 

First, to win the competition, teams must demonstrate a rigorous, validated scale model of their carbon removal solution, and further must demonstrate to a team of judges the ability of their solution to economically scale to gigaton levels.

In essence, the objective of this XPRIZE is to inspire and help scale efficient solutions to collectively achieve a 10 gigaton per year carbon removal target by 2050 in order to help fight climate change and restore the Earth’s carbon balance.

According to XPRIZE, teams can submit entries across natural, engineer, and hybrid solutions. Judges in the competition will evaluate the teams based upon four basic criteria:

1. A working carbon removal prototype that can be rigorously validated and capable of removing at least 1 ton per day.
2. The team’s ability to demonstrate to the judges that their solution can economically scale to the gigaton level.
3. The main metric for this competition is fully considered cost per ton, inclusive of whatever considerations are necessary for environmental benefit, permanence, any value-added products; and...
4. The final criteria is the length of time that the removed carbon is locked up for. A minimum goal of 100 years is desired.

In response to Elon Musk's commitment, Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE says, "It’s not too late to use human creativity, innovation, and competition to rewrite our history and create a better future for all of us on this planet we call home."

If you'd like to sign up, visit: XPRIZE.org/prizes/elonmusk — good luck!

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Written by: Iqtidar Ali. An earlier version of this article was originally published on Tesla Oracle.