Do you feel like you have the innovative ambition, technical expertise, and scientific know-how to save the world?... 

In just 100 years, human-kind has dumped enough carbon into the atmosphere to shift millennia-old atmospheric processes at a rate which is truly unprecedented across geological time. To give this some perspective, planet Earth’s previous warming extinction event, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), occurred gradually over five to ten thousand years. During this period, yearly carbon emissions were around 14-times less than they are currently, with climatic recovery from the PETM taking approximately 100 thousand years.  If humanity doesn’t address the climate emergency, we can expect an increasing frequency of droughts, heat waves, and extreme weather events alongside acidifying oceans and rising sea-levels, all of which promise sweeping humanitarian crisis and the displacement of over one-billion people from their homes by 2050.

We now know that reducing emissions alone will not be sufficient in mitigating such an impending climate catastrophe, with the IPCC estimating the need to annually remove approximately 10 gigatons of CO2 by 2050 to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees. It is estimated that without intervention, the global temperature of planet Earth could increase by 6 degrees by 2100 – truly ending the world as we know it. Therefore, the need to accelerate the development of climate mitigating solutions is now more important than ever, for the sake of all current and future life on planet Earth. 

The XPRIZE Carbon Removal challenge is aimed at tackling the climate threat through the development of scalable climate solutions which are able to remove and sustainably lock-away atmospheric CO2  for a minimum of 100 years. Any carbon negative solution is eligible to compete, with a vast scope of potential solutions including, but not limited to: air (e.g. direct air capture), ocean (e.g. primary production), land (e.g. agricultural solutions), and rock (e.g. mineralisation) based solutions. Both novel and existing technologies are eligible for the competition providing all competition requirements are met.

There are no restrictions on who can compete for the prize, with solutions encouraged from multiple knowledge bases and areas of expertise. Teams and individuals are also encouraged to collaborate, with no restrictions on the recruitment of external team members or team mergers at any point during the competition process.

The $100M prize purse for this challenge is broken down into multiple components, with the grand prizes of $80M not scheduled to be announced until April 2025. However, fifteen Milestone Prizes of $1M each will be reviewed after one full year of competition, with the prize submission deadline in early February 2022. The Milestone Prizes will be awarded to teams with the most promising concept, subject to their demonstration of continued project development, cost modelling, and evidence of a pathway to achieve full scale. 

Winning a Milestone Prize would provide your team with the opportunity to continue developing your solution and catapult your concept into a reality which could potentially save the world. 

Click the link below to learn more about XPRIZE and begin your carbon removal challenge journey today.