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 formulated a producing method to seize and convert carbon into valuable products, is the lone Tennessee startup to be named a finalist.

“We are genuinely a Tennessee homegrown business,” stated Anna Douglas, SkyNano CEO and co-founder. “The technologies was born at Vanderbilt, incubated at Oak Ridge Countrywide Lab and it is flourishing in the Knoxville area. It is really a instant of delight to be equipped to depict Tennessee.”

Even though it produced the top rated 60, SkyNano was not one of 15 winners to take house a $1 million prize in the Milestone Award category, which acknowledges the most promising concepts to pull carbon air pollution out of Earth’s environment.

XPRIZE is funded by Musk and the Musk Foundation and is touted as the major incentive prize in historical past. The best 4 organizations, named a few several years from now, will just take property $30 million-$50 million.

More than 1,100 applicants all over the world submitted proposals for this XPRIZE, which encourages development of carbon removal technologies at scale.

Applicants had to exhibit performing carbon removal know-how and then acquire price-successful ideas for capturing several billions of tons of carbon from the ambiance.

“It’s genuinely thrilling,” Douglas told Knox Information. “So a lot of teams are operating on these an crucial obstacle. It really is kind of exciting. It is exhilarating to know that you will find so many persons doing the job alongside you in unique ways.”

Before this year, SkyNano declared it had designed carbon nanotubes from captured pollutants at a Tennessee Valley Authority organic gasoline plant. These nanotubes are a precious material for producing tires, ultralight bicycles, computer system chips and sophisticated batteries.

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

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Dive Further: How a Knoxville startup is turning community pollution into ‘black gold’

Carbon nanotubes are commonly established utilizing significant-energy, fossil-gas intensive procedures that build a large amount of poisonous squander.

SkyNano’s nanotubes are built by piping the output fuel emitted into the atmosphere from a natural gas ability plant into a lithium salt reactor. The carbon is captured from the flue gasoline and electrochemically transformed into sound elemental carbon in the variety of carbon nanotubes.

For XPRIZE, SkyNano had to show that its technological innovation could capture carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere, a much more challenging task than capturing it from a one resource of air pollution.

This article initially appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Elon Musk XPRIZE names Knoxville Tennessee startup SkyNano finalist