In 2015, Carbon XPRIZE sponsors NRG and COSIA put up 20 rocks to jumpstart the carbontech economy and tackle global warming. The results are in, and they are thrilling. After 5+ years of work, on April 19, 2021, WIRED editor Megan Greenwell hosted an exclusive digital reveal of the two $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE winners. Check it out here:
The Winners
Carbon-infused concrete took the top prize
How We Got Here
In 1919, a hotelier announced a challenge that captured the world’s imagination: He offered $25,000 to the first person who could fly non-stop from New York City to Paris. Over the next 8 years, nine entrepreneurial teams would spend $400,000 to make the impossible real, igniting public interest in flight and accelerating aviation technology in the process. Your fifth grade social studies teacher taught you the rest; a U.S. Air Mail pilot won the prize, and a lauded place in history.
That thrill of boundary-pushing, global technological competition lives on in XPRIZE. Since its founding in 1994, the non-profit has designed and hosted more than two dozen contests to jumpstart innovations that promise to change the world for the better. “We design and structure competitions that help to focus innovators on a problem and invite them to actually solve that problem,” says Marcius Extavour, the XPRIZE Foundation’s VP of Energy and Climate
Here’s how it works: XPRIZE collaborates with sponsors to create and execute a prize, setting a wildly ambitious, but clear and measurable goal. The very first XPRIZE, for example, launched in 1996 and promised $10 million to the first team to achieve suborbital spaceflight—an absolute fantasy for private startups, at the time. Some prize money can be given to promising teams along the way to help them scale to achieve the objective, with a significant sum reserved for the winner.
WE ARE XPRIZE
Yes, XPRIZE and their sponsors want innovators to nail the goal, but that’s not the only reason to launch a prize. They also want to encourage global cooperation and spur outside investment. Historically, XPRIZEs have generated roughly 10x the value of the prize purse in private investment, while getting global teams together to accelerate innovation. Just like that $25K did for aviation nearly a century earlier, the Ansari XPRIZE for commercial spaceflight catalyzed the entire spaceflight industry, inspiring the launch of companies that are now household names, from Virgin Galactic to Blue Origin and SpaceX.
Since then, XPRIZE has launched nearly $300 million in prizes in sectors as wide-ranging as health, education, and the environment. It’s an inherently hopeful approach to solving problems that seem insurmountable. “Climate change in particular can be a turnoff because it’s bad news,” says Extavour. “But what we do is say, yeah, but we can also solve this problem. We have the power, the capability, the resources. And we get to showcase people who are demonstrating that.”
XPRIZE’s most ambitious contest launched in 2015 to tackle the climate change beast, taking aim at CO2, the primary cause of global warming. Along with sponsors NRG and COSIA, they launched a $20 million prize for any team who could turn CO2 emissions into consumer or industrial products, effectively kickstarting what’s now known as the circular carbon economy. In other words, the goal was to turn what’s choking the planet into something that can help it. And maybe even delight consumers.
“Six years ago, the science was clear it was doable,” Extavour says. “But the big questions were: Is it economically viable, and is it large enough to be relevant to the climate?” Independent estimates have shown CO2 conversion could absorb more than 1 billion tons of CO2 annually at scale, or about 3% of total global emissions. And those CO2-based products represent a market worth nearly $6 trillion; if saving the planet wasn’t incentive enough, the economics of doing it are.
But even though the very first carbon-capture power plant had just come online in Canada, and while some similar projects were underway, both CO2 capture rates and global financial incentives to build and operate carbon capture facilities were frustratingly low.
Enter the Carbon XPRIZE, sponsored by American energy company, NRG, and Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), a collaboration of Canadian oil sands producers working to improve their environmental performance through innovation.
“The world needs solutions to tackle climate change across multiple industries and borders,” says COSIA CEO Wes Jickling. “Partnering with XPRIZE was a natural extension of our work. The competition has proven that we can tackle the major causes of climate change while enabling responsible energy development to meet global need.” It’s a mission NRG shares, frequently funding accelerators to support new tech breakthroughs. “Partnerships like this one help bring about new technologies that can support our decarbonization effort and help our customers meet their sustainability goals,” said Jeanne-Mey Sun, NRG Vice President of Sustainability. “Finding new, beneficial uses for CO2 is a way to improve the economics of carbon capture while promoting technology development.”
Entrants would be judged on several factors, including yield, or how efficiently their system converts CO2 into a product; the total amount of CO2 converted; the economic value of their product; the market size for their product; the transformational power within that market; and the environmental impact of their product over its entire lifecycle, from CO2 extraction through final disposal. The team that could consistently convert the most CO2 from industrial emissions into valuable products wins. And so does the planet.
“There’s nothing like proof,” Extavour says. “A company proving that they’re doing it, they made a solution, and they have customers.” XPRIZE doesn’t deal in theories. “There’s no BS tolerated here. We’re looking at performance based on measurement. It’s a rigorous competition, with a third party that checks your work.”
In 2018, a judging panel of eight international experts in energy, sustainability and CO2 management narrowed a field of 27 down to 10 finalists who each won an equal share of a $5 million milestone prize based on the performance of lab-scale demonstrations. The teams used various methods to use CO2 to create everything from alcohol to nanotubes to cement. Then XPRIZE challenged each finalist to scale-up their conversion tech under real-world conditions at one of two industrial test centers: the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, connected to a coal-fired power plant in Wyoming, or the Alberta Carbon Conversion Technology Centre, connected to a natural-gas fired power plant in Alberta, Canada. (These testing centers, it must be noted, were built for this contest, but will continue to operate for any carbon capture project going forward.) The results were spectacular. Using different methods, finalists turned CO2 into everything from premium vodka to rocket fuel, sunglasses to concrete, and more. Read all about them in the boxes below.
Five-and-a-half years after the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE was first announced, the carbontech economy has clearly arrived, with this XPRIZE and its finalists at the forefront of this booming trillion dollar sector. In fact, the contest paved the way for a new $100 million XPRIZE aimed at cleaning CO2 from our atmosphere and oceans, funded by Elon Musk.
“Seeing these teams push in a realistic way how this solution can be relevant for the climate has been incredible,” Extavour says. “If some of these XPRIZE companies can help other companies, governments, or other groups meet their net zero emissions goals with real solutions, that would be a huge win.”
Meet the 10 NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE finalists
These 10 companies are the world’s leading innovators in carbontech:
