Project Vesta - CO2 Removal With Enhanced Weathering of Olivine

[Freegrass]

I was thinking about what I would write to the Belgian public media so this technology would get some more attention and give hope to the young ones who must be shitting themselves to be born into a disintegrating world with nasty viruses.

And then I wondered if such hope would end investments in home improvements because why worry if there's a solution?

But can you imagine how kids would feel if they knew the world wasn't going to end?

[Tor Bejnar]

For an enjoyable (and scientific) look at "Glorious Mud" see this Earth Logs post.  This is what becomes of olivine.

[Freegrass]

WTF? Project Vesta changed their website and what you get now is a link to a crowdfunding page to donate money. All the info is gone.

WTF?

Is this a scam?
https://projectvesta.org/

[Freegrass]

Why did I get two questions in last night? Me, a stupid fat guy with a computer?
Something smells here... He talks about governments being interested, and yet I get two questions answered?

Why was he sitting on his bed?

Oh fuck... Yet another disappointment from the destructive human virus... 

[Ken Feldman]

I just Googled Project Vesta and their website came up immediately.

https://projectvesta.org/

Given the news stories, I think it's a legitimate organization.  It claims to be a registered 501c3 (the legal name for) non-profit organization in the US.



I hope it works.  In addition to cutting our emissions of greenhouse gases down to as close to zero as we can, we're going to need to take a lot of CO2 out of the atmosphere.  Reforestation, afforestation, rapid weathering (including olivine on beaches), improved agricultural methods to restore soil carbon (including bio-char) could all help.  They're much better options than trying to capture carbon dioxide from the air, liquifying it, and injecting it into the ground in hopes that it stays there (CCS).

[Freegrass]

When you claim that governments are interested in your technology that could possibly solve the biggest crisis in human history, why do you have to beg for money and only get $378,893 USD on a crowdfunding page?

I just saw the website is back. Maybe they heard me on their facebook page?

I find it weird... This planet saving tech is so easy to understand and should have attracted all kinds of philanthropists by now...

When something sounds too good to be true, maybe it is?

[Ken Feldman]

^^^

It's based in the US, and the US is currently lead by a climate change denier.  Hopefully that will change next year and there will be more grant money available for these types of projects.

[Bruce Steele]

Freegrass, I would warn against too much frontloading of efficacy without solid science to quantify how well olivine changes ocean alkalinity. I know there are top notch biogeochemistry PhDs who know about
Greensand (olivine) and I have seen experimental methodology that can give us some numbers to work with for the chemistry side of the story. But answers for how biological systems might react take time and before you start you need to have good QA/QC on methodology.   Biology is always messy.
 Take acidification for example. I understand this particular subject fairly well.
 I helped track down funding and played an important part in starting a group called C-CAN, Calif. Current Acidification Network. Our group had its first meetings in 2010 but the impetus for a collaboration between science and the aquaculture/ fishing industries were stock crashes at Pacific Northwest US oyster hatcheries in 2007-2008 .
 So when we gathered one question centered around biological thresholds . The oyster farmers could help supply that number because they had tested water enough times while batches of oysters died in their tanks. So one species of oyster would start to crash if the saturation state of seawater dropped below 1.7 omega.
 The next question was what instrumentation could ascertain pH or alkalinity at an accuracy that in real time would result in a number accurate enough to monitor seawater at the intake source for aquaculture operations. The accuracy of each of two parameters measured separately needed to be very good because uncertainty increases when two sets of uncertainty are added together.  So from the expertise in the room we could determine the accuracy of existing technology wasn’t good enough to provide a real time numbers so oyster growers would know when the seawater of their intake pipes would kill their baby oysters.  Those instruments exist now but they didn’t in 2010.
 This is an example of biological thresholds and QA/QC  in methodology to test seawater to get reliable  results. Each different species has a different threshold of sensitivity and testing in a lab setting, or an aquaculture setting isn’t the same as instrumentation for  open ocean autonomous sensors.
 I am trying to stress the importance of proper design for biological testing of various species that exist in open water settings. When you add in potential effects of metal dissolution  in whatever olivine you source you have some very difficult and expensive testing protocols to design . We don’t have any instrumentation that is both cheap, accurate and durable. Sensors need calibration, and biological fouling can distort your results. So instruments need babysitting and experimental design can only
answer specific questions. Think time and money.
 So as much as we might want solutions we need to acknowledge the difficulty in how we get answers to very difficult questions.

 
 
 
 

 

[Freegrass]

I wish to welcome the people from Project Vesta on ASIF.

A few days ago I panicked again. Alcohol and Borderline disorder are a bad mix... I really want this Vesta project to succeed. I hope they will be able to answer all your question and connect with some of the scientists here like you Bruce. I'm sure they will need all the help they can find.

Let's fix the CO2 problem!

[Bruce Steele]

Freegrass, Although I consider it a complement to be called a scientist I am just well read on acidification and the carbon cycle.
 After reading some more it seems like olivine does make a good candidate for carbon sequestration but it involves silica and diatoms rather than calcifying phytoplankton. And when you improve  the environmental conditions for diatoms they can sometimes outcompete calcifying organisms by consuming available nitrogen and phosphorus. But there are vast stretches of ocean that are depleted of dissolved silica and additions to those areas might be beneficial in diatoms growth.
 Biological processes take surface carbon to depth so I can see where diatom growth and associated ballasting of organic carbon can improve the efficiency of the carbon sink but if dissolved nickel gets to toxic levels it can deter algae so it is a delicate balancing act. I suspect it will work best in specific regions that are both depleted in dissolved silica and somewhere that large coastal stands of kelp wouldn’t be threatened.

 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2019.00007/full

[Ken Feldman]

Stripe, an online payment processing company, is investing $1 million in carbon removal projects to remove all of the carbon it has emitted from the atmosphere.  Project Vesta will receive a quarter of the funds.

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/617201/

The Weekly Planet: A Start-Up’s Unusual Plan to Suck Carbon Out of the Sky

An online-payments company may fund more carbon removal than anyone else.
Robinson Meyer
November 24, 2020

Stripe is one of those technology companies that controls the internet’s plumbing. It makes payments-processing software that hustles money from your debit or credit card to someone else’s bank account. If you’ve ever purchased groceries on Instacart or supported a project on Kickstarter, you’ve used Stripe, even if you didn’t know it.

Lately Stripe has been helping to build a different kind of plumbing—physical pipes running from the open air to deep underground. In the past year, Stripe has become one of the world’s largest purchasers of carbon-removal credits, devoting $1 million to extracting carbon from the sky. Last month, it began allowing its customers—the businesses that use its payment software—to buy carbon removal as well.

Until last year, Stripe followed the standard playbook for a climate-concerned Bay Area start-up. It powered its operations with renewable energy, and it sometimes paid to plant trees, but it did not study carbon removal, much less purchase it. But then the company’s executives became intrigued by the idea of zeroing out Stripe’s historic carbon pollution—of removing all the carbon that it had emitted since its establishment, in 2010. They were willing to spend up to $1 million on the project.

Today, Stripe buys removal from four companies: Climeworks, which captures carbon directly from the air and injects it into underground basalt; CarbonCure, which injects carbon into concrete; Project Vesta, which uses a common mineral to convert carbon in the ocean into limestone on the seafloor; and Charm Industrial, which produces an oil from biomass and then injects it deep into the earth.

The company picked these four relatively small companies based in part on their potential to become much larger operations. “As we scale up, we hope to find significantly more,” Orbuch said. The company’s ultimate goal here is to bring the cost of carbon removal down the “learning curve”—which means, in essence, making it cheaper. By buying from these companies now, at a relatively high price point, Stripe is aiming to let everyone pay less later.