Great News: An X Prize for Oil Cleanup

The folks at the X Prize Foundation have funded big, multimillion-dollar prizes to inspire teams of entrepreneurs and inventors to advance flight technology and develop better cars. This week, at the TEDxOilSpill event, they announced they would be putting up money for a new competition with a more pressing goal: cleaning up the oil. This is great news:

The X Prize Foundation announced today that it is developing a multimillion-dollar “oil spill cleanup X challenge” to come up with solutions to cleaning up shorelines and open water fouled by oil leaking from the BP Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

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It's unclear exactly how the X Prize will be structured, what the rules will be, or how much money will be offered. CNN says it's going to be $3 million; Time says $10 million. For more information, keep your eye on the X Prize website or email francis@xprize.org.

Image: Oil spill, Grand Isle 06.07.2010 188, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 88158121@N00's photostream