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How do you kickstart an trade? The $100 million XPrize for Carbon Removal just lately introduced its 15 winners within the first competitors stage to attain gigaton-scale carbon removing. With greater than 1300 entrants within the XPrize process, the carbon removing prize will be the largest experiment in innovation in human historical past. The purpose is to decrease the price of carbon removing to properly beneath $100 per ton and in the end to retailer atmospheric CO2 for hundreds of years to halt and finally reverse local weather change. The XPrize Carbon Removal competitors’s Executive Director, Nikki Batchelor, and Mike Leitch, the challenge’s technical chief, be part of the dialog to debate the 15 milestone winners who earned $1 million every. When the ultimate awards are introduced in 2025, the winner will obtain a $50-million prize, and the runners-up will break up $30 million. Both for-profit and college groups had been amongst this yr’s winners, they usually signify a wide range of pure and technical approaches to capturing CO2 from the air and sequestering CO2 within the ocean, farmland, and rock formations.
Natural approaches, comparable to enhanced rock weathering, biomass processing, or supplementing agricultural land with biochar, are many individuals’s most well-liked carbon drawdown choices. However, we have to place many bets to create various options if the trade is to develop. Technical options, together with direct air seize and varied ocean-based approaches, have to be explored and readied to assist maintain the planet from warming greater than 2C. At this level, genuinely catastrophic local weather impacts will probably be inescapable. Given the tempo, or extra precisely, the shortage of progress in lowering emissions, society must experiment safely and deliberatively with varied carbon removing pathways. Explore a few of these methods to grasp how the nascent carbon removing trade is taking form. You can be taught extra concerning the XPRIZE for Carbon Removal at https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbonremoval
Editor’s Note: This podcast initially aired on December 18, 2023.
