Carbon dioxide levels are double what they were prior the Industrial Revolution. And we know that reducing emissions is simply not going to be enough to avoid widespread ecological collapse. We need strategies for removing CO2 from the atmosphere at scale. So, what if green sand beaches could provide a promising solution to climate change that is nature-based, affordable, and can be deployed around the globe?
Kelly Erhart and Tom Green are the Cofounder and Executive Director, respectively, of Project Vesta, an organization dedicated to capturing a trillion tonnes of excess CO2 in rock through coastal enhanced weathering. Kelly and Tom join Ross to explain how they are creating green sand beaches with olivine to remove CO2 from the atmosphere faster and store it in limestone on the sea floor. They discuss the benefits and potential risks of enhanced weathering in an aquatic environment as well as the permanence of Project Vesta’s sequestration process.
Kelly and Tom share the news of how Stripe came to be their first customer, describing how the nonprofit is funded and what’s behind their decision to make the technology open-source. Listen in to understand how the enhanced weathering process might help solve the ocean acidification problem and how Project Vesta sees their solution's scalability and cost-effectiveness.
Resources
Eric Matzner on Carbon Removal Newsroom EP018
Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide from Climate.gov
‘Exoskeleton Dissolution with Mechanoreceptor Damage in Larval Dungeness Crab Related to Severity of Present-Day Ocean Acidification Vertical Gradients’ in Science of the Total Environment
Stripe’s Negative Emissions Commitment
Stripe’s Partnership with Project Vesta
Write to me through Substack @ rosskenyon.com.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, this is a brief note here before you start listening. This episode was recorded during a period of technological change. For Reversing Climate Change we’re re‑platforming, trying to figure out what exactly we’re doing, what tech stack we use to record podcasts, and this one didn’t come out perfect. There’s a fair amount of crinkling from microphones I was able to remove in post, and also it sounds like Tom is being extra curt.
And Tom, you’re perfectly nice from our experiences in person that I’ve seen to date, but it feels like you’re answering every question champing at the bit to do so, to the point of cutting people off and starting like a second or two earlier than a normal person would. And that’s not Tom’s fault, that’s just the way that it was recorded. There was mis‑syncing in the audio. I think the episode is still good. Project Vesta is representing here and it’s a very interesting show. I hope you enjoy it. Please don’t hold that too much against us, and thank you so much for listening.
Hey everyone, welcome to Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcasting thing now, and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com/noripodcast. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what Nori [unclear] are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club? Get special access to Nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com/noripodcast for what we’re offering.
And in that spirit of being lean and that start‑up kind of way that, you know, we like to do this, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback. Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast@nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter, which you can find at nori.com/subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change.
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Project Vesta. We have had Eric Matzner on before, and now we have some more of his colleagues on because they have exciting things in the works, exciting announcements. Today I have co‑founder and director of development Kelly Erhart. Hey, Kelly.
Kelly Erhart: Hi, great to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. And we also have Tom Green, who is executive director of Project Vesta. Hey, Tom.
Tom Green: Hi, Ross. Thanks for having us.
Ross Kenyon: It is my pleasure. We have been in touch for a long time now, our paths intersect, and, well, big things are in the works for you. I’m very happy to see all the attention and people are talking about olivine and enhanced weathering. So we’ll get into the news, but we should probably start at the beginning. What exactly is Project Vesta?
Tom Green: So let me set a little bit of context first for you. As many listeners will know, we are now in a situation where we have increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to almost double what they were before the Industrial Revolution, and that has started to cause the planet to warm up. You’ve got global temperatures have increased by over 1 degree C. You’ve got a 40 percent reduction in Arctic sea ice. The effects are very, very clear. And as we look forward, what we see is that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will not be enough to solve this problem, will not be enough to avoid very dramatic scenarios in which there’s widespread ecological collapse and the displacement or death of billions of people.
So what we need to do at this point is we need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we need to do that at large scale. We’re on the brink of emitting, as a planet, about 50 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year. So what we need is solutions that can come to maturity within this decade that can capture a meaningful portion of that. Doing so will enable us to buy the time we need to execute a transition to a low‑carbon or zero‑carbon economy. So the context is, we absolutely must remove CO2 from the atmosphere at mass scale beginning this decade.
Ross Kenyon: That’s true. Yeah, the case for carbon removal. Where do you think Project Vesta fits into this mix?
Kelly Erhart: Yeah, sure. So, that being said, like I said, we kind of looked to the planet and found that nature has a way of turning atmospheric carbon dioxide into its most permanent form, rock, and it’s been doing it for billions of years. And so that’s kind of the process that we all probably learned about in, like, seventh grade geology. It’s called the carbonate–silicate cycle, and that’s where rain falls on volcanic rock and pulls carbon dioxide out of the air.
So what we’ve done is taken that process and sped it up, by taking a volcanic rock called olivine, which we found to be one of the most efficient rocks to do so, grinding it up, and then creating green sand beaches with olivine. And so at those green sand beaches there’s natural grinding that will happen through the wave action. So waves come and the grains of olivine will clash into each other, and then more surface area of olivine is exposed, meaning that chemical action removes carbon dioxide faster. And as the carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere, it goes into ocean organisms and then eventually settles on the bottom of the sea floor as limestone.
Ross Kenyon: Very cool. We’ve done some episodes before on enhanced weathering, but we haven’t done as many on how that might work in an aquatic environment. How do you think that’s different from just taking relevant waste rock from mines and spreading it out with a large surface area [unclear], or putting it in some sort of machine on land that’s tumbling it in some capacity? What do you think is the difference there?
Tom Green: So one key difference really refers to our vision as an organization, which is to turn a trillion tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide into rock. And so, as Kelly mentioned, what happens at the beach when the olivine breaks down is the carbon dioxide actually gets pulled out of the atmosphere and becomes bicarbonate in the ocean, and gets used by marine organisms as calcium carbonate in their shells and skeletons. And so when those organisms eventually die and those shells and skeletons sink to the bottom as ocean sediment, it becomes ultimately limestone, and that stone is subducted into the Earth’s crust, locking it up for, at the very least, millions of years. And so this really speaks to a key principle of carbon dioxide removal, which is permanence. We have to make sure that we are locking the carbon up in a way that is, on human‑relevant timescales, permanent.
Kelly Erhart: Yeah. And the other thing I would just add to that, speaking specifically to the land use, is that when olivine is spread on land the weathering process is generally a lot slower. And so what our project endeavors to do is speed that process up by an order of magnitude, by using the free energy of wave motion as well as all of the different organisms that exist inside of an ocean ecosystem, to additionally speed up that process beyond what it could be just through spreading it on land.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. Okay. I want to ask about this specific geological point, Tom, that you made about subduction. Are you saying that these organisms, they have shells, they die, they float to the bottom of the ocean — you care about subduction, such that tectonic plates, one goes over the other, and that land mass goes underneath the other land in the form of a tectonic plate? Is that what you’re talking about? That’s what is accounting for this millions of years of storage, that you’re betting on that type of subduction? Or is my geological knowledge bad and I’m totally wrong?
Tom Green: Well, essentially, all right, this is how limestone is made. All sedimentary rock that you see above the surface of the land was once under the ocean, and that’s where it was formed, on the ocean bed. The limestone is formed on the seabed, and then what happens is it forms in layers. So older layers of fully formed rock, the newer ones are still more in their formation, and then, yeah, over time that builds up in layers, and then through tectonic movements it gets incorporated into the Earth’s crust.
One pretty interesting anecdotal point in this is that eventually what happens to that rock, some of it gets into the mantle, the liquid part underneath the Earth’s crust — and this obviously takes many millions of years for that to happen — some of that will actually come out of a volcano in the future. And volcanoes actually release carbon dioxide. The weathering process Kelly described at the very beginning, where rain falls on volcanic rocks causing this chemical reaction which catches carbon dioxide, is the natural process by which volcanic carbon dioxide has been captured into rock over the last billions of years.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] Is that what we’re betting on?
Tom Green: I mean, we’re betting on this natural process. We don’t really view that as a bet, more of a harnessing of something that has already been happening here for billions of years.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. But for the purposes — we’re going to get into permanence, because it’s a really big part of this discussion, especially as we get to the Stripe portion of the show — but it’s still relatively permanent if it’s just at the bottom of the deep sea and it’s floated down there and it hasn’t been subducted. That’s still relatively permanent, right? Because we can’t count on millions of years from now, like, who knows what’s going to be subducted and what actually goes underground [unclear]?
Tom Green: I’ll say a couple of things about that. First, it does not need to be subducted by tectonic movements before it’s captured. It will sit there on the bottom and it will form into limestone sitting there on the bottom of the ocean, underneath the large pressures that are found there. So it will form into rock naturally as part of that process.
The other thing that’s important here is that the chemical reaction here is the equilibrium between dissolved carbon dioxide in the water, which is carbonic acid, and bicarbonate, which is another form of carbon dissolved in the water. And what our process does, what this enhanced weathering process does, is when the magnesium silicate — which is what olivine is made of, magnesium silicate — when it dissolves in the water, the silicate combines with a proton, an H plus ion, in the water. That shifts the carbonic acid to bicarbonate, the equilibrium towards the bicarbonate side, which then allows the water to pull more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid in the water. So even before any marine organism has got involved, the water is the natural [unclear] for bicarbonate, which captures it permanently in solution before it even needs to be taken up by a marine organism.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Okay, very interesting. One of the classical problems with carbon removal — I don’t know if this counts as a problem, which is one of the things that is an ongoing discussion perhaps — is that as we pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the ocean and the atmosphere are in this sort of equilibrating relationship, and the ocean will off‑gas some of the carbon that it stored into it. So we actually have to pull out more than we might think out of the atmosphere, because the ocean is going to push some of that CO2 back out of it, back into the atmosphere. And one of the reasons this is concerning, or something to take account of, is because the ocean is acidifying with increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So if you’re able to do this right inside of the ocean to start, do you think this method of carbon removal will be able to de‑acidify the ocean in a quicker fashion?
Tom Green: Yes. So as you know, and as many of the listeners I’m sure know, ocean acidification is a major problem that we’re now facing. The carbon dioxide that we have emitted has dissolved in the ocean — a large part of it has dissolved in the ocean, the majority in fact — and that has made the ocean more acidic. That is affecting numerous types of marine wildlife. For example, there was a study that came out, I think it was earlier this year, showing that Dungeness crabs are actually starting to dissolve, their shells are starting to dissolve, because the water has become too acidic for them. So the destructive effect on marine ecosystems from ocean acidification is [unclear] meaningful.
Kelly Erhart: What the enhanced weathering process does is it de‑acidifies the ocean. And so when we spread olivine sand on a beach or coastal area, as it breaks down it actually makes the ocean less acidic, which in turn can potentially support the growth of marine ecosystems, increasing the health of local wildlife, and potentially providing an economic benefit by making aquaculture yields improve, or helping fisheries, because of the overall benefits to the food web that reducing OA causes.
Ross Kenyon: Great. I think that is a very nice summation that allows people to have enough knowledge to work with, understand the science behind what you’re doing. But you’ve been working on this for a while, both of you have, and Eric and your other colleagues, and you just had your first customer, which — gigantic congratulations. That is a huge milestone for any organization. So what’s been happening with that? I’m sure you get a lot of attention at this moment.
Tom Green: Probably right. It’s been a great and busy few weeks since the Stripe announcement. So for those who are not aware, Stripe announced the process by which they put out a bid for proposals to purchase negative emissions. And so we were one of many organizations which submitted proposals to Stripe saying that we can sell negative emissions, and Stripe picked us as one of four organizations from which to purchase these negative emissions. So this was huge news for us, because not only is it our first sale, our first earned income as a non‑profit, as opposed to the philanthropic donations that we’ve been getting, but also it’s the world’s first purchase of negative emissions from enhanced weathering.
So that’s really helped us to validate that this is something that could actually work. Part of the problem we face is that, speaking frankly, it sounds like magic. Wait, so you take these crystals and you put them on the beach and it somehow magically captures CO2? A lot of people are understandably skeptical because it just sounds too good to be true. And so getting the validation of a public negative emissions purchase from a company that’s very dedicated to reducing its carbon footprint and ultimately becoming carbon negative was a huge step for us, and we’ve been getting a lot of interest and publicity since then.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] Kelly, you’re one of the co‑founders. Did you imagine that this would be a non‑profit? Was it a non‑profit from the start?
Kelly Erhart: Yeah, it was.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. But you’re in sort of, you know, high‑tech Silicon Valley kind of area. Like, why would you not want to make this a business? If you’re successful, surely you’d be a billionaire.
Kelly Erhart: Sure. Yeah. It has been a non‑profit since the start, and I have experience in kind of commercializing sustainable technologies in the past, but we started a non‑profit as a project to reverse climate change. And for us that meant not being manipulated by the market and not being able to kind of be dissuaded by capital interests. And so our main goal here is to make a meaningful impact on climate change and scale the research and the development of the technology of enhanced coastal weathering. And so the piece of that is that it’s a non‑profit; the other piece of that is that we’re going to open source everything that we find within Project Vesta, so that this technique can scale across the world and achieve that goal of moving gigatonne‑scale carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Not the first time you’ve been asked that one. One question — I saw there was recently an AirMiners event that had the various companies, organizations, that Stripe purchased its first negative emissions from all participated in, which is a great event. If you’re not a part of the AirMiners community, definitely recommend you doing so and becoming a part of it. I thought there was a question in the chat that caught my attention. I hadn’t seen it discussed before, which is — you said the composition chemically of olivine is magnesium silicate.
Tom Green: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, so as this chemical interaction happens, when olivine interacts with sea water and the energy of water moving, is there any risk that the magnesium that’s coming off of this and going into the water has any sort of adverse effects? Are there risks that exist with enhanced weathering, especially in an aquatic environment, that we should be aware of?
Tom Green: So the magnesium silicate, when it dissolves — let’s talk about the two components of that. Magnesium is already present in large quantities in seawater. The amount that we add is not significant. Silicates are also present, and they’re actually used by diatoms, and in some cases we can actually potentially foster diatom growth through the extra silicates that become available. So we’re not too concerned, and our ecotoxicologist collaborators are not too concerned about that. There are questions about trace elements that are found in the olivine. So the second most commonly talked about one is nickel. Nickel is present in a lot of olivine reserves, and nickel above a certain concentration can be toxic to marine organisms.
So this is an area that is a big focus of study for us. We are studying that both in the lab, and we’ll also be studying it at our pilot beach, monitoring nickel concentrations carefully both in the water and even in the tissues of local marine organisms, to make sure we fully understand any [unclear]. It’s worth saying, the ecotoxicologists that we are working with believe that this would not cause a problem, that the nickel will not be bioavailable for various reasons, and that it will be in low enough concentrations that it will not cause any harm. But it’s something we are going to be monitoring very closely, because of course we don’t want to solve one problem and cause another at the same time. We want to make sure that everything we do is not just helping the climate but is also locally ecologically sound.
Ross Kenyon: Now, one related question I have to that is scalability in general and how that works, because maybe it isn’t a problem at these lower levels, but if you’re trying to do a trillion tonnes of CO2 turned into rock, I wonder if it becomes a problem then. But then again, I had a friend, who I am no longer so close to — maybe this answer will tell you why — but he was saying, like, he opposed the idea of Nori, because he said if we were successful we would basically be [unclear] the Pleistocene ice ages. And I was like, I would love to have that problem. I don’t know that we’re going to get to that extent. Why wouldn’t people just stop paying for it if it’s going to push us out of an interglacial period? I don’t know. So is that similar for you, as a sort of, like, a question, like, I would like to have that problem?
Kelly Erhart: I always say yes. I think getting to the kind of scale that we need to get to in order to capture gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is something that we’ll be doing in stages, and we’ll be measuring the local and regional impact at every stage. And, you know, as a reminder, we broadly expect this to, at least in some ecosystems, have potential benefits in reducing ocean acidification. That is going to be a good thing, and there’s no way we can really overshoot on that based on the numbers.
Tom Green: You know, just to pick up the point of, are we going to trigger another ice age — people sometimes ask us that, well, what if you guys are too successful? And the reality is, we’re in a race against time here. The probability of us overshooting is close to zero. And by the way, if the planet did start to get into an out‑of‑control kind of cooling phase, we’ve already got a lot of data on how to warm the climate. We know how to do that, we’re really good at that. So I’m not concerned about [unclear] triggering another ice age.
Ross Kenyon: That’s cheeky, but I approve. Another scalability hurdle I could foresee is to what degree is olivine or other types of minerals available at scale to be deployed. Imagine if this became a primary way of carbon removal for the entire planet. There would be an entire industry devoted towards research and development that is trying to find substitutes and enhancing the ability to grind rock into fine rock, to mine rock and then deploy it at scale. Is that probably how you’re thinking about that too, or is there some sort of natural limit to the minerals that are available to use in this way?
Kelly Erhart: Yeah, there’s definitely more than enough olivine on Earth that we need to reduce emissions by the amount that is needed to reverse climate change. And so olivine is one of the most abundant minerals on Earth. It makes up over 50% of the upper mantle, and we only need seven cubic miles of olivine, which is a tiny fraction of what is available on the planet.
Tom Green: Exactly. And then just one thing to add to that is, as Kelly said, there’s plenty of olivine available and it’s all mapped, actually — we know where the reserves are. The other thing is the infrastructure, and part of the good news there is there’s plenty of mining. What we need to do is we need to mine and quarry olivine and transport it to the places where it can do its work, and the infrastructure to do that already exists. Mining equipment, transportation equipment to take it to ports, which is where we’d also need to get it to, is all already in place. And so the scalability of this solution is really remarkable, because it doesn’t rely on building new factories everywhere to do new things. It doesn’t rely on some massive new global [unclear]. So much of what needs to be done is already in place. And once we can demonstrate that this process works and it’s safe, we believe that the scale curve can be really quite rapid.
Ross Kenyon: Is it hard to measure the permanence on a beach or underwater? How do you guarantee that, or reasonably assure people? I guess you could say this is one of the long‑running difficulties of soil carbon, which is more where Nori’s focus is at the moment: how do we model and test for and make sure that what we say is happening actually is happening? How do you do that for something like olivine?
Tom Green: Yeah, it’s a great question, right? Because a lot of technologies, if you’re capturing the carbon in some solid form, then you can point to that piece of it. Whereas with us, it’s strangely more complicated, but it can be done, and we have a broad network of scientific collaborators. And referring back to what Kelly was saying earlier, being a non‑profit and having an open source approach, we’ve been able to reach out to leading scientists in all of the kind of multidisciplinary fields that are relevant to this.
So as part of that outreach, we’ve been researching that exact question of, well, how can we measure this in a way that is most effective? And, you know, at our pilot beach we’ll be taking samples of the water at different depths, we’ll be taking core samples of the sand on the sea bed too, and measuring a very large number of chemical and biological indicators, which taken together will enable us to chart what’s going on, to be able to track effectively the carbon dioxide as it comes into solution and then where it goes after that. And all of these data will be available for our network of scientists to review, to publish papers on that will be peer reviewed, so we can build a scientific consensus that shows what the [unclear] is for exactly how much carbon dioxide is captured.
Ross Kenyon: And exactly how does the olivine basically stay where you dump it? Or is there another — there was talk of putting some of this olivine in the English Channel, because of the amount of turbulence in the water that would have enough energy and turnover such that it was removing carbon dioxide at pretty great speeds. But something like that latter case, where it wasn’t just dropped on a beach somewhere, sounds very hard to track, especially as the timelines expand. Is that the case?
Tom Green: Yeah. Here’s how it works. We’re going to be doing a series of different olivine deployments, and the first one that we’re doing is in this cove. And there’s actually a photograph of the cove on our website if anybody wants to check it out. And if you look at it, you’ll see that it’s open to the ocean, but it’s relatively enclosed, meaning it has a fairly low refresh rate of the water. So once the water enters the cove, it takes at least 2 days on average to exit. And so in an environment like that, the chemical changes in the water build up significantly. We can use those to track exactly what’s going on.
We will be gradually doing a series of experiments to understand how different coastal marine environments have different, what we call, weathering rates. So how quickly does the olivine break down? Where does it go? What happens to it? And so when we get to the point where we’re spreading olivine over large areas of shallow seas, such as the English Channel as you mentioned, we will no longer be trying to measure every detail of the water at that point. At that point we’ll have enough data that we can extrapolate what must be happening in areas like the English Channel.
And to answer, I guess, the actual question that you asked about where does it go — it depends on the marine environment, but as you know, sand on the beach will be transported by wave action and by currents, and of course all of this sand will be subject to the same forces. So it moves around, and that movement is actually a key part of the weathering process, which enables it to break down.
Ross Kenyon: To what extent are these effects localized versus distributed across the entire ocean world? Is it something like the English Channel or some of these other areas would have a more basic composition relative to other parts of the ocean that are more acidic, or does it all even out pretty quickly?
Tom Green: The ocean acidification effects will be primarily more local, and then gradually will even out as the diffusion happens and the water mixes, and it also spreads out into the ocean. The main ocean acidification benefits will be local, so deployment sites will see a meaningful decrease in the ocean acidification. We’ll have to do this at really enormous scale before we start to see an ocean‑wide effect on OA. A lot of where this matters is in coastal environments, you know, when you have a lot of the species that are more sensitive to the pH of the ocean. So that effect will be a little bit more local, based on the dissolution of the olivine, wherever that’s happening. The effect on the atmosphere will be much more global, because there’s just a lot more rapid mixing that goes on there. So we don’t expect to see enormous disparities in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere depending on where we do this. We expect that to get distributed fairly quickly.
Kelly Erhart: Yeah. And just to speak to that localization of the acidification, I think that’s where we are really excited about running experiments and [unclear] full benefits of how this might impact, as Tom was saying, the local organisms of that system. You can imagine stacking functions with kelp farms or oyster farms, seeing if there’s any benefit by combining processes.
Ross Kenyon: That part I never thought about prior to this podcast, and that’s very exciting to me too. I know there are localized interventions people are experimenting with to save certain coral reefs, and I wonder if this could be a similar thing, where if you’re able to de‑acidify strategic fisheries that would otherwise be severely harmed or outright killed — maybe this could look like, Dungeness crab sounds, you know, perilous, maybe you could put the olivine there, we could still have crab.
Kelly Erhart: It’s an open question, and it’s something that we’re really excited to do some research on.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that is cool, because one of the things about this conversation — soil gets a lot of play in particular of the co‑benefits beyond just the carbon sequestration element, but industrial and more hybridized approaches don’t have as much of that often. Some of them do, but not all of them do. And I didn’t expect that with enhanced weathering, but if that is a co‑benefit, I think that’s a huge deal.
Kelly Erhart: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I think industrialized processes, while they’re important to continue doing research on, of course most of them don’t come with co‑benefits and a lot of them actually come with externalizations. And so for us, yeah, we were really curious about all the ways that this process can be completely beneficial from start to finish, right? As we scale, looking at responsible mining and what that means for us and what that can mean for the industry as well.
Ross Kenyon: Are people going to go for green beaches, though?
Tom Green: I think so, they’re gorgeous. Yeah. There’s one on the island of Hawaii, the big island of Hawaii. There’s a green sand beach there, it’s called Papakōlea, and it’s made out of olivine sand. And when you go there, it’s a tourist attraction, it’s a beautiful place, there are people splashing in the water and playing in the sand, and by the way, there’s a vibrant marine ecosystem there as well. And so part of our mission is to help people to see the beauty in green sand beaches — of course not just the visual beauty, but also the beauty of the fact that these beaches are actually capturing carbon dioxide and helping to reverse climate change.
Ross Kenyon: As those chemical transformations happen after the olivine has been deployed, will the beaches remain green, or will the color change?
Tom Green: The beach will be green for as long as there’s olivine there. So a likely model is that we will put olivine on a beach, and then as the olivine weathers and washes away and dissolves in the water, we’ll then go and put more olivine on that beach. When there’s a good site for doing it, then it will make sense to do that repeatedly. So as the olivine washes away, the beach will return to its normal color, but we’re likely to put olivine back on that beach and make it green again.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, cool. Yeah, my imagination is inspired by this. Very, very neat idea. How does it work for funding? How does someone participate? Is this mostly the businesses or organizations that you’re selling to, or seeking donations? How are you planning on thinking about funding, especially since you’re a non‑profit?
Kelly Erhart: Yeah, so certainly there’s businesses and organizations that we’re reaching out to, and Stripe is a great example of that, but then also we’re asking for large and small donations from individuals. So we’re raising money through a number of different verticals. We are accepting donations, we’re also selling olivine jewelry, which you’ll see on our website. And really, any donation is helpful, whether it’s large or small. So there’s the aspect of folks helping as a grassroots effort and donating what they can, then there’s of course large gifts that we’re hoping to receive from organizations around the world. And if many listeners are interested in making a donation, then feel free to get in touch with us through our website and we can give you all the details you need.
Ross Kenyon: Right. Where is this pilot beach?
Tom Green: So we’re not able to say exactly where it is at the moment. It is in the Caribbean, it’s on a Caribbean island, and our team has visited the beach and analyzed it and identified another great site for our pilot. And so we are beginning the process of our pilot as we speak. By the way, one of the things that makes it such a good site is that there is one cove which is going to be our experimental beach, where we’re actually going to put the olivine sand down, and then there’s another cove very close by that’s very similar, which is going to be a control cove. So we can measure not only what happens before and during and after we put the olivine sand on the beach, but we can also compare that to what happened at a very similar beach during this whole period where there was no olivine intervention.
Ross Kenyon: Well, it sounds plausible to me, although, Tom, it sounds a little bit like a boondoggle. You guys just going down there, hang out in the Caribbean, check out coves. Really rough life, come on.
Tom Green: One of the nice things, yeah, that could be said about this process is that the warmer the water, the faster it happens. So all of our best locations are in tropical paradise.
Ross Kenyon: That’s okay, we’ve grown accustomed to loving our rural hinterlands. But yeah, it’s hard to beat tropical beaches.
Kelly Erhart: Yeah. And just to speak to that, you know, we have found our first beach, but we are actively looking for additional experimental beaches and beach sites. So that’s another kind of call to action for anyone who’s listening and wants to contribute. If you know of a private beach, or you have connections to, you know, maybe it’s a government representative in a certain area that this might work in — any warm beaches are kind of ideal. And if you want to learn more, you can go to our website and we have a quick form that you can fill out about which beaches would be best.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. I think I have one more question, and I think, Kelly, this one is probably for you. Since this is so open source — Nori, we love open source tech too, and to the degree to which we are able we try to live those values as a company. If you’re releasing this stuff publicly, and you’re a non‑profit, is there a risk that others see this idea and commercialize it in some way that you’re not expecting?
Kelly Erhart: So you could look at that as a risk, and I think that whenever you release anything open source there’s definitely a potential for people to try it out themselves. But we don’t see that as such a bad thing, so long as we can set out standards for what the right practices, the best practices, to do in this field are, and so long as people can buy in to what is acceptable — how you can deploy one of these projects holistically and with the entire lifecycle of impact in mind — then we think that’s great. We want this project to scale, and that might not mean Project Vesta being the only one that does it. Of course, we are kind of the first ones out there doing it, and so by doing so we really do feel it’s incredibly important to establish best practices and establish kind of a model for how this can be done in the world, so that anyone who does want to replicate it is doing so in the right way.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a great answer. We often answer that question in similar fashion. We want to reverse climate change. If people are imitating what you’re doing and maybe even improving on it, it’s more important that we solve this problem than that we as individuals or as a small company or non‑profit are successful, right? I sure hope so.
Kelly Erhart: Okay, absolutely. Yeah, I think we’re on the same page.
Ross Kenyon: That’s it. That’s a great attitude. I think this is really compelling. I’m so excited that you’re receiving support from Stripe. I’m sure there’s other things coming down the pike for you, and there’s at least one pilot that also has a neighboring cove as a control. That sounds very neat. What do you think this might look like a year from now, a couple years from now? What are you looking forward to?
Tom Green: It’s a great question, and we’re really excited about the project as it moves forward. And I can sort of lay out a little bit of a vision of how we think this goes. Essentially, over the course of the next couple of years, we’re going to be primarily focused on the scientific research that demonstrates that this works in the real world environment. So doing our first pilot, doing some lab experiments, starting to do follow‑up pilot beaches, which enable us to get more data, to try this in different environments. So that’s probably roughly what the next couple of years look like.
After that, we hope that the science will then have been demonstrated and we’ll be able to really begin to support the deployment of this in various countries all around the world, and that will be a gradual process. But as I mentioned earlier, this is a very scalable process, and so we’re looking at the idea that this could be scaled in parallel in quite a few countries around the world at the same time. And so as we look forward, we want to hit gigatonne‑plus scale by the end of the decade, and that is a massive amount of growth from where we are today. We just sold three kilotonnes, 3.3 kilotonnes, to Stripe of negative emissions, and we’re talking about scaling up a million times from there. So that’s a huge amount, but we also see that there is nothing that we can see ahead of us that would prevent us from pursuing that. And that’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about the project.
And frankly, that’s why we exist as Project Vesta. Because, you know, there was 30 years of research that had gone into enhanced weathering before Project Vesta came along — a lot of studies, lab experiments, theoretical studies, and research on where is the olivine. And out of all of this work, we came along because there was limited progress towards getting these real‑life experiments to happen: bringing together a multidisciplinary group of scientists, the funding, the government to get permits, and all of that, and frankly just the sort of organizational project management and drive in order to actually get this process out of the lab and onto the beach. And we’ve now made a lot of progress towards that already, and we already have our first pilot beach. So we feel like we’re very much on that path, and we’re really excited.
Kelly Erhart: Maybe I will add a little bit just to speak to the trees part, and that would just be to say, you know, of course we support soil carbon sequestration, of course we support planting trees. I think that anyone who is deeply within the climate movement and isn’t in recognition of the fact that we need a multitude of solutions in order to truly make a change and reverse climate change is probably not looking at the right data. It’s just that we think that our solution is the one that can really be permanent, scalable and cost‑effective. And so just, yeah, hearkening back, wanted to say thank you to everybody who’s also involved in this movement. All of the solutions that are being deployed today are so necessary in order to make a change made real in this short time frame that we have as a global community. And so just wanted to touch on that.
Ross Kenyon: Perfect. I think it’s a fine point. We’re definitely all‑of‑the‑above people here. We really need all hands on deck, as we’re fond of saying. Where can people follow up with both of you individually, and also learn more about Project Vesta?
Kelly Erhart: Yes, you can learn more about Project Vesta online, on our website. It’s www.projectvesta.org. We have tonnes of resources on there. We have a page devoted to science, so if you want to nerd out you can go and read all of our scientific articles and journals that have been published over the last 30 years by experts in the field, as well as our plan. And you can find ways to donate on there. As I mentioned, we’re seeking both large and small gifts, and anything anyone can contribute certainly helps. And then if you want to get in touch with either of us, you can email our names at projectvesta.org.
Ross Kenyon: Are you both on Twitter as well?
Kelly Erhart: Tom is on Twitter, I believe. I’m not on Twitter.
Tom Green: I’m also not really on Twitter.
Ross Kenyon: Why aren’t you on Twitter?
Tom Green: As little screen time as I can get, the better. And these days I’m on my screen pretty much all day long, so I just try and do as little social networking as possible.
Kelly Erhart: We do have a Project Vesta Twitter, though. We have Project Vesta Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, so you can reach us all on there as well.
Ross Kenyon: We’re pretty kindred on that one. I got that. And then, Tom, I’ll link to both your organization’s social media links, but also to you personally. Is there anything else you’d like to add, Tom?
Tom Green: No, thank you very much for us. Just to say thank you so much for having us on. We really appreciate [unclear], and a lovely conversation. I’m happy we’re able to do it.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for making time to come on the show.
Tom Green: And yeah, thanks so much for asking, and thank you for all the work that you and your team are doing at Nori. It’s really inspiring to see the way that it’s taken off and the leadership that you’re taking in the space.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks. I’m mostly just running my mouth on the internet. Does that still count?
Kelly Erhart: Sure.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I’ll [unclear] then. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave reviews on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, iTunes, tell your friends, and thank you so much for listening. But — thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts and/or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience.
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