Correcgt! We have already generated $250,000 in revenue from our first customer, Stripe. Even though we are a non-profit focused on advancing the science, we can still generate all the revenue required, and we hope our project will be self-sustaining...
Thank you for your kind words! We have been getting a decent amount of attention lately, but we are very much heads down, working on our science and deployment of our experiments. We announced in April, on Earth Day, that we have found a pair of bays in the Caribbean where we will run our first experiment(s). And in May, Stripe announced their selection of CDR purchases and we were selected for 3333.33 tonnes @ $75.
There was a lot going on in the world at the time when it was announced (and for whatever reason Stripe's post or the following article didn't receive traction on HN), but
that announcement made it into Reuters-> Stripe picks $1 million in carbon-removal projects to spur industry
https://www.reuters.com/article/climate-change-stripe/stripe...
This was our first bigger article, that came from our poster in December at the American Geophysical Union with our plan to take our coastal enhanced weathering "from the lab to the beach"-> Could putting pebbles on beaches help solve climate change?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Could-puttin...
And more are on the way! That said, we are working really hard right now to have our pilot projects and foundational research completed, published, peer-reviewed, and CDR process certified in time for the UN IPCC's first global stocktake in 2023. At that time, countries will have to take account for how they will meet their targets and update their plans. We are working to make sure our process is ready to go by then for deployment.
>"The Paris Agreement offers a dynamic but durable framework for increasing climate action over time. One of the sources for this dynamism is the “global stocktake“ – a moment every five years for all countries to pause and account for what has been achieved so far, and what must still be done, to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement."
https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/05/insider-designing-global-st...
Can you please explain where all the olivine is found? I can't think where I have seen any amount of it, other than on a few beaches in Hawaii. Descriptions of the project seem to suggest it is extremely abundant somewhere. Where?
Hi, Project Vesta is a non-profit focused on advancing the science and logistics for deployment of coastal enhanced olivine weathering. Right now, your money will be going to fund our Phase I experiments focused on demonstrating the safety of the process, along with weathering rate and dissolution kinetics. The goal of our Phase I experiments is to use the data to create an open-source model that brings all of the relevant parameters together into a single model. We plan to create an algorithm called the Coastal Enhanced Weathering Integrated Assessment Model (CEWIAM) that will be able to take inputs related to a specific beach site, and combine the Weathering Rate and Safety Data with a Life Cycle Assessment so that it can output a "Net $ cost per tonne of CO2 removed per year" from a given site. The model will be open-sourced and peer-reviewed by the scientific community, in additional to having it validated by 3rd parties so that it can be the foundation for an entirely new field of carbon dioxide removal. It is our belief that once this model exists and is validated and demonstrated successfully, massive projects would be financed by the private sector potentially for carbon dioxide removal credits, etc, as well as enabling governments to deploy this on potential gigatonne scales as beach nourishment projects that also help them make up for the shortfall in their Paris Agreement emissions commitments.
Thanks. I actually just took a look around there and was disappointed there wasn't a 'News' section or something like that, so glad to hear there will be updates soon!
I do have one other question: is there any chance you'll partner with a Canadian charity, or other ex-US charities for that matter, to accept tax-free donations from other countries?
Hi Funklute, most of the models out there for dissolution kinetics and weathering rates are a type called "shrinking core models" such as those used in analysis by Hangx and Spiers (2009). Those models definitely do not take into account the effect of grain-on-grain collisions, surface abrasion, the constant refreshing of warm, acidic water, and/or fauna such as lugworms[1]. For example, the constant collisions chip off fine fractions of olivine that themselves weather rapidly. And the constant grinding removes a silica coating that dramatically slows the weathering rate of stationary olivine. Lugworm digestion can speed up the weathering rate by 100x-1000x, etc.
Ask your friend if he knows of any models that take even some of these considerations into account, as all of them will be present in the coastal environment and contribute to our accelerated weathering rates. Also, please show him these simple desktop shaker experiments here [2] and here [3], that show the rates are much higher than the core shrinking models calculate when the olivine is in motion (and these experiments are in fairly cold water compared to the tropics). This is the type of research that we base our calculations on. That said, we are in agreement that we need the rates to be empirically validated. So, first we are going to deploy a Phase Ia Safety Pilot Study, and once that is on the beach we will begin work on our Phase Ib Speed Pilot Study to demonstrate the accelerated rates. Thank you for your optimism for the project, we welcome feedback and hope to help spread the understanding of the underlying processes that make the project viable :)
Hi mdorazio, thank you for mentioning our project! We are around HN and have some notification for mentions, so feel free to call us in whenever :) Have some updates coming soon, will maybe submit a link tomorrow with an update from our latest poster with our plan for deployment of of Phase Ia Safety Pilot Project. Let us know if you have any questions.
See the Stripe blog post announcing the purchase: Stripe’s first negative emissions purchases https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases
Our post: Stripe and Project Vesta, and what this means for us https://projectvesta.org/stripe-and-project-vesta-and-what-t....
Reuters coverage of the purchase: Stripe picks $1 million in carbon-removal projects to spur industry https://www.reuters.com/article/climate-change-stripe/stripe....