Theory vs. Practice

Practice separates workable ideas from the rest.

You can call it theory vs. practice, talk vs. action, science vs. technology, or whatever you want, the essence is the same. You truly know something after putting it into practice. Until the rubber meets the road, the vehicle might just as well be an idea in your head.

Putting your ideas to practice exposes the hidden pitfalls or limitations of the existing methods you considered to make your idea work, or in other words it pinpoints a series of flaws in your original concept. That’s why we do ‘a pilot’. A good pilot thus acts as a great filter to separate what’s workable from what is not, and transforms a potentially workable idea into a workable technology. A well-designed pilot demonstrates the viability of a concept as well as the cost of achieving the desirable. In my previous post ‘Why should we care?‘ I talked about the importance of enabling technologies. Through proper piloting all the necessary enablers are brought to focus and any vulnerabilities or shortcomings are also highlighted.

It’s coincidental that I am talking about another recently announced carbon XPRIZE ( 100 million-dollar Elon Musk carbon XPRIZE ) as an example to highlight the importance of pilots here. In fact, this new carbon competition appears to emphasize well the role of actually building something in real life rather than merely sketching it on a piece of paper or describing in a PowerPoint presentation. In a nutshell, this competition is aiming to challenge participants to extract 1000 Mt/y of carbon from atmosphere or oceans and sequester it, and to do so at the lowest cost when all costs are accounted for. Carbon sequestration at a relevant pilot scale seems to be the goal of this XPRIZE.

Though less likely, it will be delightfully surprising if we uncover new ideas during the competition. The theory of most good ideas to extract and sequester carbon is generally well understood and widely accepted. But leaving it at that level is not doing much good to humanity. Commercial application at a few Gt/y scale is what is needed in order to make a real difference.  Implicit in the term ‘commerce’ is the understanding that the process should be cost effective. But it all has to start at a fit-for-purpose pilot scale to iron out hidden difficulties, and this tournament is one such vehicle to kick off that process. In other words, this competition is an acid test of different theoretical ideas through simultaneous piloting.

There is a common hurdle for developing technologies due to the high cost of pilots. Secondly, a fair comparison of technologies aimed at the same goal takes time for a variety of reasons. This competition does appear to address both of those issues in one shot.

Kudos to the sponsors and organizers, and kudos to the fearless innovators and teams who plan to participate!

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