carbon xprize blog series
While a copywriter for the XPRIZE Foundation, I worked on a series of blog posts that followed the teams working on converting carbon into useable products. Without a background in science myself, I conducted interviews with the experts and translated these big, heady concepts into relatable posts that our funders and supporters could understand and support.
“By 2050, our world’s population is expected to grow to 10 billion people.
With that amount of growth, we will need to almost double food production in order to keep everyone fed—and using current methods, that amount of production would emit an enormous quantity of greenhouse gases, further adding to the issue of climate change.
With this challenge in mind, three semifinalist teams competing in the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE are working to create technologies that recycle carbon emissions into resources we desperately need.[…]
“Over the last few weeks we’ve talked about how the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE semifinalists are working to create valuable products like plastics and building materials out of CO2 emissions. But what if we could replace fuels like gasoline and diesel, which are fossil fuel-powered, with a CO2-derived substitute?
These three teams are doing just that by converting CO2 emissions into fuels that will be able to power our world in a sustainable way. But in order to compete with fuels already on the market, these teams have to make sure that their alternative fuels will be economically viable as well.
Our only semifinalist team based out of India, Breathe is working to efficiently and cost-effectively convert CO2 that is emitted from coal-fired power stations into methanol. Their team, made up of scientists, students, engineers, and entrepreneurs, operates under the mission to “turn artificial photosynthesis into an economic reality.[..]”
Catalyzing A New Market: Converting CO2 Into Products
“By now you may have heard that the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE semifinalists are converting CO2 into an entire range of products that will benefit our everyday lives. And of the twenty semifinalist teams, five of them are actually turning the greenhouse gas into different forms of polymers and plastics!
These materials are used in a wide range of applications all over the world—but currently, they are manufactured using fossil fuels. That’s where our semifinalists’ technologies come in. Creating polymers and plastics by recycling waste CO2 could be a way to tackle climate change, while also increasing the sustainability of these materials. That’s why we sent our team at XPRIZE out to see just how well these technologies work.
One semifinalist team brought us a quick drive down the coast from XPRIZE headquarters to Huntington Beach, CA, where Team Newlight is based—a team that has developed and commercialized a cost-competitive carbon capture technology capable of converting CO2 into a plastic-replacement called ‘AirCarbon.’ […]”