Billionaires promote CO2-removing schemes to protect climate

Paris, May 24 (AFP/APP): The boss of NetZero still can’t believe his start-up has won a million-dollar prize from Elon Musk to improve ways of sucking climate-heating carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air.

“That’ll fund a year of R&D (research and development)… or two-thirds of a factory,” Axel Reinaud told AFP.

The XPrize Carbon Removal competition, set up by the billionaire Tesla boss, is a response to the scary conclusion reached by the world’s top climate scientists.

However quickly the world slashes man-made greenhouse gas emissions, it will still need to extract CO2 from the air and oceans to avoid climate catastrophe, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in April.

Today, CO2 removal is a necessary weapon in the battle to stop global heating accelerating beyond a point of no return.

Technology to do so exists but remains prohibitively expensive. It also needs to be ramped up significantly to make a dent in the 40 billion tonnes of CO2 the world emits each year.

So private-sector giants are stepping in to kick-start research, as they did with vaccines and the first aeroplanes.

The $100-million (93-million-euro) XPrize initiative is a bid to foster low-cost solutions for sucking up huge quantities of CO2 every year and stocking it forever.

The top prize will be announced in 2025.

NetZero has already scooped up one of the 15 early-stage awards for an astute economic model.

It burns farm waste, which contains CO2, and turns it into “biochar”, a kind of “carbon dust” used to enrich the soil.

The heat generated by burning is captured to generate renewable electricity, which is sold to the grid.

In all, NetZero says it can remove a tonne of CO2 for just a few dozen dollars.

In North America, companies like Alphabet, Meta, McKinsey, Shopify and Stripe have agreed to invest $925 million in fostering carbon removal schemes between now and 2030.

The First Movers Coalition, an alliance of some 50 firms from sectors where emissions are hard to reduce such as aviation, shipping and cement, has also committed to financing carbon removal technology.