By Tesla Inc boss and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is offering a 100 million prize in a fouryear global competition to find a way of reducing carbon dioxide from the Earths atmosphere.
Musk, who also heads rocket company SpaceX, had first tweeted about the prize in January and had said he would disclose details of the competition at a later date.
This is not a theoretical competition; we want teams that will build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level, Musk said in a statement on Monday.
Full guidelines will be announced on April 22 and the competition will last for four years through Earth Day, 2025, XPrize, which organized the competition, said on Monday.
Eighteen months into the competition, the top 15 teams will receive 1 million while twentyfive 200,000 student scholarships will also be distributed to the competing student teams.
Following that, the grand prize winner will get 50 million, while the second place holder will get 20 million and 10 million will go to the third place holder, the Californiabased nonprofit organization said.
To win the competition, the teams would have to create and demonstrate a solution that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in an environmentally benign way, XPrize added.
Reporting by Ayanti Bera in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernard Orr
Source Reuters
