Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is donating $100 million toward a prize for the “best carbon capture technology.”
Carbon capture is, in fact, a broad mix of technologies with the same aim: collecting carbon dioxide so it doesn’t escape into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. The greenhouse gas can be captured from power plants and factories, or even directly from the air.
Musk, who heads Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said he’ll unveil details of the prize next week. But his past statements suggest that one of his key goals is to lower the price of direct-air carbon capture so it can feasibly be used to make synthetic rocket fuel, replacing the fossil fuels used now.
In 2017, he said: “There isn’t some way to make an electric rocket. I wish there was. But in the long-term, you can use solar power to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere, combine it with water, and produce fuel and oxygen for the rocket.” He brought up the idea again in 2019, when he responded to a question on Twitter about using carbon capture to make rocket fuel, saying “rocket flights will be zero net carbon long-term.”
What Musk is describing is not science fiction. There are at least three startups—Canada’s Carbon Engineering, Switzerland’s Climeworks, and the U.S.’s Global Thermostat—that have each built working pilot plants to capture carbon dioxide from the air. Carbon Engineering has even made a small batch of synthetic fuel from CO₂.
The science itself isn’t new. Researchers have been able to use chemical reactions to convert CO₂ into hydrocarbon fuels for about a century. The difficulty has been lowering the cost of the process and figuring out how to power it with clean energy. Because CO₂ is the end-product of burning fossil fuels, reversing the process requires a huge input of energy.
And while capturing carbon from facilities where burning fossil fuels is not trivial, trying to suck it from the air where concentrations of the gas are very low requires filtering large amounts of the gas for a tiny volume of CO₂. The three companies with pilot plants spent tens of millions of dollars to get to this stage, and there’s a long way to go. The cost of securing one ton of carbon using direct air capture can be as high as $600—about 15 times the price of carbon traded in Europe’s market.
There are two ways to bring down the cost. The first is to work out the problem of scaling up in real time—build large plants at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, giving engineers the opportunity to optimize the process through trial and error. Carbon Engineering is currently working with Occidental Petroleum Corp. to build a plant that can capture 1 million tons of carbon dioxide each year.
The second, possibly more cost effective, route is to increase the pace of innovation. Governments can boost funding for research and development. Or billionaires can launch attention-grabbing competitions. With a prize, “you’re inducing activity where there is an opportunity,” said Tris Dyson, managing director of Nesta Challenges, a nonprofit focused on innovation in the U.K.
It’s a strategy that’s been around for centuries, and it’s worked in the past. The Longitude Rewards were a series of prizes launched by the U.K. government in 1714 to help develop practical methods for determining the precise longitude of a ship at sea. The reward tugged at the entrepreneurial spirit of innovators, and participants often ended up spending more money in total developing the technology than the prize sum itself.