It sounds like something out of science fiction: 10 teams of scientists and innovators that are working on plans to converting carbon emissions into useful products will ship out to two carbon-dioxide emitting power plants. Five teams will travel to a natural-gas fired plant in Alberta, Canada, and the five others will go to a coal-powered plant in Gillette, Wyoming. There, they’ll have two years to prove the validity of their models.
“We give the teams literally the pipes coming out of the power plants, and they can bring whatever technology they’re developing to plug into that source,” says Marcius Extavour, XPRIZE senior director of Energy and Resources and the lead on the Carbon XPRIZE competition. Teams will be judged on how much CO2 they convert, and the net value of their innovations.
The finalists stationed at Wyoming include C4X, a team from Suzhou, China producing bio-foamed plastics, and Carbon Capture Machine from Aberdeen, Scotland, which is making solid carbonates potentially to be used in building materials. Carbon Cure from Dartmouth, Canada, and Carbon Upcycling UCLA from Los Angeles are both experimenting with CO2-infused concrete, and Breathe from Bangalore is making methanol, which can be used as fuel.
“This XPRIZE is about climate change, sustainability, and getting to a low-carbon future,” Extavour says. “The idea is to take emissions that are already being produced, and preventing them from leaking out into the atmosphere or oceans or soil, and converting them, chemically, into valuable material.”
The two entities sponsoring the prize certainly make it seem like that’s a possibility. One, NRG is a large energy company that manages power plants across the U.S., and Canada’s Oil Sand’s Innovation Alliance, a consortium of oil sands producers. (NRG has made efforts to reduce its emissions; it’s retiring three natural-gas fired plants across California over the next year.)
“This isn’t about a proposal anymore,” Extavour says. “This is about: Can you build it in a way that works and is reliable? And can you do it in a way that’s not just climate and carbon sustainable, but economically sustainable? Can you build a business around this technology? Because if you can, that’s how we can get emitters of CO2 today to actually adopt these solutions and scale them up, and really take a bit out of emissions.”