Elon Musk explains 100 million XPRIZE for Carbon Removal

yeah i mean our goal is like basically to uh do something that uh it you know to have it be sort of interesting fun and ultimately useful um and to spur uh uh creative ideas for what is actually the smartest way to take the trillions of tons of carbon that we we've removed from the ground and we'll remove from the ground um from deep deep underground and and we've we've placed that carbon in the atmosphere and oceans which obviously changes the the chemical constituency of the surface of the earth yeah um and since we know that uh long term we're going to have to have renewable energy anyway um because we'll we'll run out of oil and gas it's not going to last forever so we know we know where this ends up this has to end up with uh renewable sustainable energy um it's taught logical um it's really just a question of do we try to get there sooner or later you know and we should try to get there sooner it's uh obvious why run like why are on the ex how long do you want to run this experiment then we've got tomorrow we've got the uh our third asteroid launched before we dive into the to the carbon removal uh rules and so forth yeah uh i mean it's obviously you've got a dichotomy because our rockets do produce carbon you know true like what a hypocrite true no no you guys obviously just he's always just in for the money um but but let's talk about let's talk about the crew crew i feel like i should address this this is being a hypocrite by you're launching rockets that produce carbon uh here's the problem is uh right now there is there's really no way to get around the physics of a rocket so uh i think it's important for the long-term uh preservation and and ultimately the expansion and extension of the scope and scale of consciousness and the long-term uh probability of survival of humanity and life as we know it we must become a multi-planet species uh because they're always where there's been many civilizations that risen in fallen and anyway we've got to preserve uh we're going to become multiplanetary and right now the only way to do that is with um with rockets that do burn fuel but we do have a long-term plan for sustainability of um of even rocket flights uh by generating uh propellant uh using um sustainable energy wind and solar to generate starting first with liquid oxygen and for our starship vehicle uh it's uh almost 80 liquid oxygen yeah and 20 uh liquid methane and um the oxygen it's obviously pretty easy to create that you just use wind and solar electricity and and you do air separator because you've got the oxygen already in there the plants are making the oxygen so you can use this you can just use electricity basically renew electricity to create 80 of the propellant on the rocket and then for the remaining uh 20 you can use the body a process where you take you actually take co2 out of the atmosphere and you combine that with water to create ch4 and more o2 and that's and that's in fact what we would do on mars sure to generate propellant sure so so there is a long-term plan for sustainable generation of propellant uh for the rockets i do want to emphasize that 50 turns now we're talking a real space program let's go to uh let's go to the questions on on the carbon removal price we'll be going to your questions at in twitter in about about 20 minutes 15 20 minutes so elon this is the largest prize ever ever largest incentive prize ever and i would argue for one of the most largest of uh civilization scale challenges we have sure and uh we get into the rules in a second so that folks who are looking at creating teams can understand why why we created those rules but why did you fund this let's start with the the why there yeah i think i wanted to spur ideas and thinking about uh the long-term need to capture carbon and you know i think this is one of those things that's going to take a while to figure out what the right solution is um and especially to figure out what what the best economics are for uh for co2 removal um and and and all the things i think through all the consequences you don't want the cure to be worse than the disease yeah uh so uh you know sometimes people say well just plant a bunch of trees i'm like that's not so easy you know like like a trillion trees sure exactly and then you gotta like okay well how are you going to get fertilizer are you going to water them where's the water going to come from uh what habitat are you potentially destroying where the trees used to be it's not it's not just a no-brainer if there's go plant about it but it's not to say that's not a good viable option we should plant some trees i i i'm in favor of planting trees it's just not a question of like okay um you know there are like vast sections of like like the sahara desert or or uh the you know the some large barren areas very dry areas in the u.s where you couldn't plant a lot of trees but you're going to need a lot of water yeah and you're going to like like you're going to have to cultivate them it's not like they don't just throw some cheese on the ground um uh and their team work really well together so the first thing is that for a team to win this and we'll talk about the prize amounts and so forth they've got actually build something that works yeah and demonstrate something that can extract a thousand tons per year a kiloton of carbon per year as a demo scale model and that what comes out of it is something that um uh matters to the future um so that's that's the goal to be clear and so if people have you know uh ideas for adjusting the rules um yeah we're going out as guidelines yeah and uh we're gonna have i think until mid-may for get public feedback tell us if we miss something right we will turn them from guidelines to rules once we get really feedback and we've gone out to so many of the amazing clients scientists out there yeah and it's yeah unless the rules need to need to be valid uh for the for the four years of this prize duration yeah so we're now teleported to andromeda so like uh but it doesn't actually work so to win this prize uh a team actually during the four years has to build something that can at minimum pull out uh a thousand tons of carbon per year yeah so they can show us that do they have to do they have to pull out a thousand times or just show that the rate it works no they have to pull out like a literal thousand times we'll weigh it [Laughter] on scale and we're gonna we're gonna like you know maybe we could calculate it to be a thousand times but the rate at which yes they'll have to run it for a year to get a thousand times out but if they're running for a month that's okay probably it's okay okay all right it's very hard to make something real i think in my view prototypes are trivial and production is hard yeah um and there's the the general um generally people think it's the prototype that is the hard thing prototypes are well i mean obviously you're gonna have that one percent of inspiration but as the saying goes one percent inspiration 99 perspiration yeah um ideas are plentiful actually getting it done is very hard you could say fully considered cost actually just means that if there are um you want to look at both the benefits and the cut the cost actually so if uh if in um sequestering carbon removing it from the uh atmosphere or oceans uh uh it has has some uh perhaps some environmental impact uh which might be small but it's not negative that certainly needs to be taken into account um and uh and then by same token if uh what's done is in extracting carbon is a useful product sure that from which you can generate revenue then that should count too right so and i'm just sort of saying for argument's sake like let's say uh you could create um you know um construction construction material like you know um cement cement yeah which we just i'll talk about that later some kind of useful rocks that are rocks that are useful or sand or i don't know yeah um something that's useful for construction um then uh you could say okay well this is what we could sell it for and uh you know and then just fully consider pros and cons and and and say okay this is what you know if um if we need to pay to have it done in the future which we probably will have to do then um what's the what's the lowest net cost yeah and and to be clear the the working teams what they do has to be net negative right it's not a break even it's not play out a thousand tons and then emit a thousand tons and in fact one of the things we talked about absolutely one of the things obviously yeah one of the things we talked about it's gonna be worse than the disease yes how how long do you need to sequester the carbon for us we had a big debate you want to share what you came up with there what the team came the rate of carbon um sequestering is to far exceed the rate which say it is uh potentially dissolving back into the atmosphere yeah um so um you know like if if uh yeah um and so one of the rules is that you have to listen and the hardest thing is that the winning team has to prove to our judges that their approach can actually scale to a gigaton level otherwise it's not going to be useful exactly it can't be a niche yeah it can't be inherently niche and if anybody knows about scaling up i i think yeah you do uh yeah scalable scaling is hard yeah so yeah i i don't know what the answer is here really um but i think if a lot of smart people work on this there could be some really creative solutions something generally useful for the world yeah in that regard absolutely um yeah and i think just be clear like looking for pragmatic solutions it doesn't need to be perfect um you know it's but it's got to be something that's just fundamentally if we scaled it up would it would work yeah that's it so let's talk about the prizes that are up for grabs um first place is going to be 50 million yeah which is significant our hope is that it's going to attract enough cognitive surplus out there to focus in on this yeah um 30 million split between sort of a second third and fourth place prize and one of the things that you and your team put forward is maybe it might be split into different categories right uh different approaches yeah i i mean we want to reward people who have done great work yeah fun fundamentally i'm i'm open to increasing the price size too over time so if it turns out like hey somebody really really kicked ass and and uh and somehow there's not a price for them we'll also add some more to the price that's that's extraordinary yeah

Channel: CNET Highlights

Views: 168,477

Keywords: event, livestream, 2020, live, elon musk, carbon removal, xprize, spacex, tesla, neuralink, climate change

Id: UvgSSwJMhNQ

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021