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IPFS News Link • Climate Change

Elon Musk $100 Million Carbon Removal XPrize

• https://www.nextbigfuture.com, by Brian Wang

XPRIZE Carbon Removal is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity – fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth's carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone.‎

The four-year global competition invites innovators and teams from anywhere on the planet to create and demonstrate solutions that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans, and sequester it durably and sustainably. To win the grand prize, teams must demonstrate a working solution at a scale of at least 1000 tonnes 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.

Any carbon-negative solution is eligible: nature-based, direct air capture, oceans, mineralization, or anything else that achieves net negative emissions, sequesters CO2 durably, and show a sustainable path to achieving low cost at gigatonne scale.

Highlights from the talk are SpaceX related.
Elon Musk has the goal of landing both the upper stage Starship and the Super Heavy Booster back on the launch tower. This will enable faster turnarounds and up to three Starship launches per day. There could be a dozen Super Heavy Booster launches per day.

The medium-term goal would be 1000 Starship launches per year from each Starship.