Elon Musk will be giving a prize of US$100 million to the best carbon capture technology, the entrepreneur tweeted, adding that he would unveil details on this next week.

“Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology,” Tesla’s chief executive wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

The donation could be part of a prize connected to Xprize Foundation, a non-profit organization that gives prizes to industry-changing technology for a better, safer, and more sustainable world, a person with knowledge of the plan told TechCrunch.

The decarbonization of the energy infrastructure, the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in heavy industries, and the production of low-carbon hydrogen will be virtually impossible without carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a report last year.

“Reaching net-zero will be virtually impossible without CCUS,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.

Strengthened climate goals and increased government support have created in recent years a new momentum for CCUS to become a large-scale, cost-effective solution to reduce emissions in many carbon-intensive industries.

The carbon capture concept and related technologies have been around for years. But the fight against climate change has prompted governments, major oil and gas companies, and scientists to pay more and more attention to the idea that sucking carbon out of industrial emissions or directly from the air could be a way to reduce emissions from oil and gas operations, as well as from hard-to-abate emissions in industrial processes such as steel, chemicals, or cement production.

CCUS is becoming increasingly popular among governments as they try to “build back greener” after the pandemic. It is also gaining popularity with some of the biggest oil firms. It looks like everyone in the oil and gas sector and other heavy industries is now taking carbon capture seriously and working on related technologies, while governments support such technologies because environment-conscious investors and the general public will not have greenwashing anymore and demand decisive actions.

This article is reproduced at Oilprice.com