Elon Musk said yesterday on his Twitterthat he intends to give $100 million as a prize to the best technology carbon dioxide (CO2.
The Tesla CEO , who recently surpassed Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person , did not provide further details about the donation. He tweeted that more details would be revealed next week. However, a source told TechCrunch that the project is linked to the Xprize Foundation, a non-profit organization that hosts competitions aimed at encouraging technological development and innovation for the good of humanity.
CO2 capture and storage technology , promoted by Elon Musk , does exactly what its name suggests. It captures carbon dioxide emitted from refineries or factories and then stores it in order to remove the potentially harmful byproduct from the environment . In doing so, it helps combat climate change. It's not a particularly new technology , but little progress has been made so far.
In general, many companies have tried over the past two decades to help mitigate climate change using various methods.
The high cost of carbon capture and storage has been one of the main obstacles to the development of this technology. However, there are companies that have been working on carbon capture and use, a technology similar to carbon capture and storage, where carbon dioxide emissions are captured and converted to other, more valuable uses.
For example, LanzaTech has developed technology that captures exhaust emissions and uses bacteria to convert them into ethanol fuel. Using a bioreactor, exhaust emissions from factories, etc., are converted into liquids. LanzaTech relies on a bacterium that likes to “eat” these gaseous wastes. As the bacterium eats the emissions, it creates ethanol. The ethanol can then be converted into a variety of products. LanzaTech has also created a new independent company called LanzaJet that is working on other potential products, such as converting ethanol into ethylene (or ethene), which is used to make polyethylene for bottles and PEP for the fibers used to make clothes.
Other companies involved in the capture and use of gases are Climeworks and Carbon Engineering.
Swiss-based Climeworks specializes in direct air capture, which uses filters to capture carbon dioxide from the air. The emissions are stored or sold for other uses. Carbon Engineering, on the other hand, is a Canadian company that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and processes it for other uses or even to create new synthetic fuels.
Source: Techcrunch
