Can This Mineral Help Avert Climate Change?
As the co-founder and president of the start-up Vesta, Kelly Erhart works where oceans, climate, and innovation intersect. I recently sat down with this startup president for a podcast conversation in which Kelly shared her vision for creating a “net-positive” response to the natural world with our podcast listeners.
A novel way to absorb CO2
Kelly’s startup Vesta is working on an ocean-centered sustainable solution to the problem of climate change, using its Coastal Carbon Capture methodology. The idea is simple: The company produces a carbon-removing sand from the naturally occurring mineral olivine and applies it to coastal areas vulnerable to erosion. The added sand serves as an effective means of permanently sequestering carbon dioxide, which means it also offers the benefit of lowering the acidity in ocean water.
The other part of Vesta’s plan involves building out a technology that can measure the carbon removal accomplished as a function of carbon credits available for sale. In other words, it’s not just a good idea. It may be a profitable one.
Since Vesta was established in 2019, it’s raised $6 million worth in equity, alongside the same amount in charitable donations. Vesta is now looking at raising a far bigger Series A round.
The company’s already launched a couple of pilot projects on the East Coast, and is preparing for one in the Caribbean region. And it’s poised to move forward in the near future to create larger projects to fight against climate change at scale.
The scope of the problem
The problem begins with greenhouse gases, but it doesn’t end there. Even if humans immediately ceased all emissions-generating activities, dangerous levels of these gases would still remain in the atmosphere. So the other part of the equation involves removal, which Erhart points out is an urgent necessity at large scale. Vesta’s innovation involves nudging the natural geochemical processes through which the earth removes carbon dioxide from its atmosphere, and locking it away in a solid form on the ocean floor.
Enter olivine
Olivine has proven to be an excellent means of doing exactly this. It’s an igneous rock that, in the normal course of time, naturally removes CO2 from the atmosphere. The carbon removal process of which olivine is a part is called the carbonate silica cycle, and it consists of the slow transformation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back into rock formations.
But this takes eons. We obviously don’t have time to just wait around for it to happen. So Erhart and her team have figured out that they can accelerate the whole process. They grind olivine rock until it forms a soft, fine-grained sand, then spread it along eroding beaches. This environmentally sound procedure then boosts the ability of the rock to capture and lock away the CO2 without harming beachfront land.
Olivine may be one of the best-kept secrets of the mineral world, in terms of its game-changing potential for the environment.
This richly green rock is found on every continent, and in abundance in Earth’s mantle, and is one of the minerals that form numerous types of meteorites. It’s also one of the most efficient types of rock for sucking carbon out of the air after interacting with water.
Enhanced weathering
Here’s a good way to visualize this process: Rainwater falls onto olivine or another type of absorbent volcanic rock. This prompts a natural chemical reaction. Carbon dioxide from the air then actually enters the H2O molecules, producing a baking soda-like bicarbonate as the olivine dissolves.
As the bicarbonate water flows into the ocean, it changes into other types of carbon, most commonly calcium carbonate that eventually drops to the sea floor to form the sediment that will one day serve as a component in the formation of limestone. So, what Vesta is doing is participating in a natural, millions-of-years-long geological process without adding any CO2 into the oceans, simply by speeding up the weathering of olivine.
That’s a key point Erhart made: The oceans are constantly absorbing carbon from Earth’s atmosphere, to the point that the acidity levels of ocean water are now about 30 percent higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. The greater acidity affects the growth and health of ecosystems and species, with the most prominent examples being corals and Dungeness crabs. In terms of a choice between our oceans storing carbon as carbonic acid or as bicarbonate, Vesta offers the second, harmless choice.
Vesta, now with more than a dozen PhD scientists working full-time, has built out its scientific road map to include extensive further study on the use of olivine as an “enhanced weathering” tool.
The company’s data-driven methodology led by research experts, Ultimately, the company hopes its methods of Coastal Carbon Capture will enhance not only shoreline restoration, but even larger projects with even greater impact in the fight against climate change.
So go check out this podcast episode and let me know what you think!
