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$25,000,000 CO2 X-Prize

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  • $25,000,000 CO2 X-Prize

    Courtesy of one Mr. Richard Branson.

    The head of Virgin Group said at the launch in London, UK, that the prize was not for removing emissions from power plants before they reach the atmosphere and storing them deep underground – an existing technology known as carbon capture and sequestration.

    Instead, the brief is to devise a system to remove a "significant amount" of greenhouse gases – equivalent to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide or more – every year from the atmosphere for at least a decade...The initial closing date for Branson's Earth Challenge is 8 February 2010. If the judges deem that no design submitted by that stage is worthy of the prize, it will re-open for two more year-long phases.

    Extraordinary things
    Branson has received impressive backing for his new environmental initiative. His five co-judges are former US vice president Al Gore, Jim Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute, James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, Australian conservationist Tim Flannery, and Crispin Tickell, director of the Policy Foresight Programme at Oxford University, UK.

    Steve Howard, chief executive of The Climate Group and an advisor to the judges, said: "For $25 million, people will do extraordinary things. It's to fire people up and say: 'let's do this.'"

    Environmentalists have welcomed the initiative, but Friends of the Earth said it should not distract from the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions at source, "including unsustainable air travel".

    Celine Herweijer, climatologist at US-based Risk Management Solutions, says: "While we should welcome initiatives like this that aim to limit the amount of climate change in the future, we also need more creative solutions to the problems that climate change is already causing."
    It's a start.

    Kevin

  • #2
    Ogden Nash will be laughing from his grave:

    They told me it couldn't be done,
    With a smile, I went right to it.
    I tackled that job that couldn't be done -
    And couldn't do it!

    10 billion tonnes of CO2 over 10 years? This is about what we are pumping into the air every 6 months. Over the same 10 years, we shall have added at least 190 billion tonnes, so he considers 5% as "significant".

    Let's imagine that someone does this. What can you do with 10 billion tonnes of CO2? OK, you say, it can be chemically sequestered. Not with lime, because producing the lime will release more CO2 than you can sequester. Caustic soda, electrolysed from sea water? Great, you will end up with 24 billion tonnes of sodium carbonate, occupying 5.5 billion m3 of space, not to mention you would produce over 16 billion tonnes of highly toxic chlorine gas. The energy required to electrolyse that much sea water would require about 600 large nuclear reactors.

    The sheer scale of the idea is stupendous.

    I guess his money is quite safe!
    Brian (the devil incarnate)

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    • #3
      you can make alot of club soda with it
      We have enough youth - What we need is a fountain of smart!


      i7-920, 6GB DDR3-1600, HD4870X2, Dell 27" LCD

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