Tesla Corporation President Elon Musk pledged on Thursday a $ 100 million prize to anyone who develops the best technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions.
Capturing global warming emissions has become an important part of many plans to keep climate change under control, and very little progress has been made in technology so far, with efforts focused on cutting emissions rather than taking carbon out of the air.
And the International Energy Agency said late last year that increased carbon capture technology research was needed if countries were to meet their emissions-free targets.
A study published in Scientific Reports last November concluded that companies and governments urgently need to "start developing technologies to remove greenhouse gases on a large scale from the atmosphere," a process known as carbon capture and storage. .
As a contribution to these efforts, Elon Musk wrote - in a tweet on his Twitter account - "I donate $ 100 million as a prize for the best carbon capture technology," and promised to provide more details over the next week.
Am donating $ 100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2021
Musk co-founded and sold online payments company PayPal and now leads some of the world's most futuristic businesses.
Together with Tesla, he heads the rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.
US President Joe Biden has pledged to accelerate the development of carbon capture technology as part of his comprehensive plan to address climate change.
Biden wants to make carbon capture more widely available, cheaper and scalable, and he plans to increase federal investment and tax incentives to advance the technology.
And expert in carbon removal technologies, Jennifer Wilcox, has been appointed as a senior deputy assistant secretary of fossil energy at the US Department of Energy.