20 finalists selected to advance breakthrough solutions for CO2 removal using air, rocks, land, and oceans.
Over 1,000 companies and research teams are now working to remove carbon dioxide from the sky or ocean and permanently lock it away. Many of these enterprises were vying for top spots in a $100 million global competition - the largest incentive prize in history.
Now, the 20 most promising projects are advancing to the final round of the four-year-long contest as the nonprofit foundation Xprize has announced the short list of finalists, including teams in Denmark, Canada, Kenya, India, Australia, UK, the US and China. The grand prize winner, to be announced in April 2025, will take home $50 million, while the runners-up will split a $30 million pot. (The foundation already doled out $20 million in earlier stages to student teams and 15 “milestone” winners.)
The competition, which is backed by Elon Musk’s charitable foundation, aims to advance breakthrough solutions for carbon dioxide removal, not only by awarding prize money but also by analyzing and publishing data on each team’s performance throughout the process.
“Carbon removal is a complicated space,” Nikki Batchelor, the executive director for Xprize Carbon Removal, told Canary Media. “Not only do you have to be able to do the carbon removal; you also have to be able to prove that it’s been done and to create trustworthy data along the way in order to gain credibility.”
Meanwhile, Climeworks has opened the world’s largest operational direct air capture (DAC) plant to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, with its Mammoth plant in Iceland almost ten times larger than the current record holder. Mammoth has the capacity to capture 36,000 metric tons of CO2 a year and will be fully complete by the end of 2024. The removal process is energy intensive, but Climeworks' plant is perfectly located to be powered by Iceland's renewable geothermal power plants.