Hingle/Bloomberg
BP contract workers use a vacuum hose to clean oil from the beach in Louisiana.
Want $1 million? It's yours - if you can come up with a way to clean up the Gulf oil spill. The X Prize Foundation announced a high stakes invention challenge on Thursday, soliciting the public for solutions to clean up the spill in exchange for $1.4 million in prizes. Dubbed 'The Oil Cleanup X Challenge,' the competition is a year-long event designed to cull the best oil-removal suggestions from inventors and regular people alike. "I got involved in this challenge because I felt it was the most constructive thing I could do," Wendy Schmidt, the competition's sponsor, told ABC News. "We have a responsibility to clean up the mess that we're making." Schmidt, wife of billionaire Google CEO Erich Schmidt and president of the Schmidt Family Foundation, has pledged to give $1 million to the winning idea. Second and third place finishers will receive $300,000 and $100,000 respectively. Innovators will have the next year to submit their proposals, which will be judged by a panel of experts. The most promising plans will then go head-to-head in the summer of 2011 at the world's largest ocean water oil spill recovery testing facility, located in New Jersey. First place will go to "the team that demonstrates the ability to recover oil on the sea surface at the highest oil recovery rate and the highest Recovery Efficiency," according to the competition's website. And while the competition comes too late to clean up the immediate effects of this year's spill, Schmidt says the event is primarily designed with a look ahead. "Our focus is future disasters," she said. Peter Diamandis, Founder and CEO of X Prize, noted that while millions of dollars have been spent to develop oil drilling capabilities, "Little money has been spent on how do you clean it up." X Prize is best known for sponsoring a $10 million competition in 2004, which challenged inventors to create spacecrafts for private flight. Since then, the foundation has continued to encourage scientific breakthroughs in fields such as space travel and gene mapping by offering huge cash incentives. Schmidt and Diamandis believe that offering a monumental financial reward will produce significant results. "It really is a chance for real innovation," Diamandis told ABC. "Sometimes a really radical breakthrough, the day before it's a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea."
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