Knoxville startup named finalist for Elon Musk’s $100 million carbon removal tech prize

Knoxville startup SkyNano has been named a finalist for Tesla founder Elon Musk’s $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Elimination prize.

SkyNano, which has produced a producing technique to seize and convert carbon into handy components, is the lone Tennessee startup to be named a finalist.

“We are seriously a Tennessee homegrown business,” mentioned Anna Douglas, SkyNano CEO and co-founder. “The know-how was born at Vanderbilt, incubated at Oak Ridge Countrywide Lab and it truly is flourishing in the Knoxville area. It really is a second of delight to be equipped to symbolize Tennessee.”

Though it produced the prime 60, SkyNano was not just one of 15 winners to consider home a $1 million prize in the Milestone Award group, which acknowledges the most promising principles to pull carbon pollution out of Earth’s ambiance.

XPRIZE is funded by Musk and the Musk Foundation and is touted as the major incentive prize in background. The top 4 corporations, named a handful of a long time from now, will just take dwelling $30 million-$50 million.

Additional than 1,100 candidates all over the world submitted proposals for this XPRIZE, which encourages development of carbon removing systems at scale.

Candidates experienced to exhibit operating carbon elimination engineering and then establish cost-powerful plans for capturing many billions of tons of carbon from the environment.

“It truly is actually fascinating,” Douglas explained to Knox Information. “So many teams are doing the job on these kinds of an crucial challenge. It is really variety of enjoyable. It really is exhilarating to know that you can find so many folks doing work alongside you in distinct techniques.”

Earlier this calendar year, SkyNano introduced it had created carbon nanotubes from captured pollutants at a Tennessee Valley Authority normal gas plant. These nanotubes are a important content for building tires, ultralight bicycles, laptop chips and sophisticated batteries.

They are so likely handy that Vanderbilt professor and SkyNano co-founder Cary Pint referred to as them “black gold.”

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Dive Deeper: How a Knoxville startup is turning neighborhood pollution into ‘black gold’

Carbon nanotubes are typically made employing large-vitality, fossil-fuel intense processes that create a lot of toxic squander.

SkyNano’s nanotubes are built by piping the output gasoline emitted into the atmosphere from a organic gas electricity plant into a lithium salt reactor. The carbon is captured from the flue fuel and electrochemically converted into stable elemental carbon in the type of carbon nanotubes.

For XPRIZE, SkyNano had to demonstrate that its know-how could capture carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere, a far more complicated activity than capturing it from a solitary supply of pollution.

This post at first appeared on Knoxville Information Sentinel: Elon Musk XPRIZE names Knoxville Tennessee startup SkyNano finalist