The past 12 months have seen a surge of interest in methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that to date is responsible for around a third of global warming. The market for methane-reduction credits is booming, and a new emissions accounting method offers companies a more holistic means of assessing the impact of the gas.
That momentum could soon be boosted by the launch of Mission Methane, a new competition from XPRIZE designed to accelerate the progress of fledgling methods for avoiding methane releases or removing the gas from the atmosphere.
The decision to prioritize a methane prize reflects an awareness that tackling the gas can provide near-term climate benefits that would complement existing strategies to address carbon dioxide, explained David Babson, XPRIZE’s executive vice president for climate, energy and nature.
“Methane is the one to target to arrest warming quickly, and CO2 is the one to target to stabilize the climate long term and to end the long-term warming trend,” he said.
Why methane matters
Mission Methane was birthed at the annual meeting in Los Angeles in April 2024 of the XPRIZE Brain Trust, a group of more than 100 advisers from academia, business and other sectors. Around 10 potential prizes in climate, energy and nature were mooted, including one on methane. Brain trust experts in those areas whittled the list down to four over the summer, which were presented at a second meeting, known as the conclave.
Around a month before the group assembled, the importance of methane was recognized in a National Academies for Science, Engineering and Medicine report on the gas. Around two-thirds of released methane leaves the atmosphere after 12 years, but during that time its impact on warming is up to 150 times greater than that of CO2. That means cutting methane levels will have an outsized and relatively quick impact. The study, said Babson, “highlighted the unique opportunity to target methane as the greenhouse gas that could arrest warming the most quickly.”
The report added weight to arguments for a methane prize, as did testimony from Rob Jackson, an earth scientist at Stanford University who spoke at the conclave. “I have to give him a lot of credit,” said Babson. “He had such credibility when he spoke and was very eloquent.” When the votes were counted, methane emerged as the next XPRIZE priority, alongside a women’s’ health competition known as Ovarian Decoder.
Designing the prize
Babson is designing the competition and raising money for the prize pot. Taking inspiration from the XPRIZE for carbon removal, awarded in April to a company that helps smallholder farmers draw down carbon, competitors in Mission Methane will demonstrate technologies that can prevent the release of a certain amount of methane in a year, or remove the same amount from the atmosphere. Babson expects it will be on the order of 100 tons — relatively small, but the winner will also have to demonstrate a plausible path to scaling their technology.
On the avoided emissions side, Babson said the focus will be on dilute sources, such as livestock operations. Biotech companies developing vaccines that disrupt the formation of methane in cows’ stomachs would be one type of contender, he noted. Potential removal technologies include HVAC filters that react methane with oxygen to form CO2, a less potent greenhouse gas.
Projects that capture methane from point sources, such as disused oil wells, will not qualify because the technologies involved are already market-ready, said Babson. But the need to accelerate use of point-source methods was discussed during an XPRIZE session at Trellis Impact 25, held last month in San Jose, California. Babson said he came away from the session convinced of the benefits of growing the market for more mature methane technologies and is now working on a parallel funding mechanism for that, likely based on an advanced market commitment structure.
His priority for now, however, is convincing donors to back Mission Methane. A prize fund of $20 million to $50 million would be sufficient to spur the innovation he hopes to see. “In a perfect world, we would get that commitment later this year and be in a position to launch the prize by late of Q1 or early Q2 of 2026,” he said.
Meanwhile, the evidence continues to mount: A paper published last month in Science found that methane mitigation efforts have the potential to reduce the damages caused by climate change by more than a trillion dollars by 2050, while costing only one-sixth of that.