2/28/24, 4:42 PM Can Rock Dust Soak Up Carbon Emissions?

A Giant Experiment Is Set to Find Out | WIRED

GREGORY BARBER BUSINESS DEC 7, 2023 8:00 AM

Can Rock Dust Soak Up Carbon

Emissions? A Giant Experiment Is Set to
Find Out
The idea of sprinkling rock dust on farmland to soak up atmospheric
carbon will be tested at large scale, thanks to a $57 million purchase from
corporations including Stripe and Alphabet.

COURTESY OF LITHOS CARBON

SAVE

Mary Yap has spent the last year and a half trying to get farmers to fall in love
with basalt. The volcanic rock is chock full of nutrients, captured as its crystal
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structure forms from cooling magma, and can make soil less acidic. In that
way it’s like limestone, which farmers often use to improve their soil. It’s a little
more finicky to apply, and certainly less familiar. But basalt also comes with an
important side benefit: It can naturally capture carbon from the atmosphere.

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Yap’s pitch is part of a decades-long effort to scale up that natural weathering

process and prove that it can lock carbon away for long enough to make a
different to the climate. “The bottleneck is getting farmers to want to do this,”
Yap says.

On Thursday, Yap’s young startup, Lithos Carbon, got a $57.1 million boost for
its quest to turn basalt dust into a viable climate solution. It came from Frontier,
a benefit corporation backed by a consortium of companies aiming to finance
promising approaches to carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. Lithos says it will
use the funds to soak up 154,000 tons of CO2 by 2028, by sprinkling basalt
dust on thousands of acres of US farmland. The average US car emits about 4
tons of CO2 each year.

The carbon removal purchase is the largest yet by Frontier, which was formed
last year with nearly $1 billion from its tech-dominated members. Many of
those companies, which include Meta, Alphabet, and payments processor
Stripe, which owns Frontier, have made climate pledges that require not only
reducing the emissions from their operations and supply chains but also
“negative emissions”—sucking up carbon from the atmosphere to cancel out
other emissions.

That accounting trick has been easier to prove out on paper than in practice.
Many companies would have once turned to buying carbon offsets from
activities like protecting forests that would otherwise be felled. But some have
been trying to move away from those scandal-plagued and often short-lived
approaches and into more durable techniques for carbon removal.

The current options for companies seeking negative emissions are limited.
Frontier’s purchases are essentially down payments on ideas that are still in
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their infancy—generally too hard to verify or too expensive, or both, to attract a

significant customer base. “What we're trying to evaluate the field on is
whether it’s on the trajectory to get to climate-relevant scale,” says Nan
Ransohoff, who leads Frontier and also climate work at Stripe. The group
starts with small “prepurchases” meant to help promising startups, and then
moves on to “offtake” agreements for larger amounts of carbon that its
members can count toward their emissions goals.
The Lithos purchase is one of those larger deals. It prices carbon removals at
$370 per ton, about a quarter of which will pay for field monitoring and
modeling to verify that carbon is being sequestered away from the atmosphere
for the long term. Ransohoff says Frontier believes that Lithos is on a path to
its goal of removing CO2 for customers at a cost of less than $100 per ton, and
at a rate of at least a half a billion tons per year.

‘Most Promising’ Approach

Lithos, founded in 2022, is developing a technology called enhanced rock
weathering. It involves spreading a fine dust of basalt across fields before
planting. As the rock further weathers from rainfall, it reacts with CO2 in the air.
That forms bicarbonate, which locks away the carbon by combining it with
hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Ultimately, the compound is washed into the
ocean, where the carbon should stay put.

The strategy has the benefit of piggy-backing on things that humans already
do, Yap says. That’s in contrast with techniques like direct air capture, which
involves building industrial plants that suck carbon out of the atmosphere. It’s
easy to measure carbon removed that way—it’s all captured there onsite—but
critics say it will be difficult to scale up because removing enough carbon to
make a difference will require thousands of dedicate, resource-intensive
facilities.

Using basalt dust to capture carbon should be more easily scaled up. There
are plenty of fields to dump rock dust onto, and plenty of water for carbon to
end up in. But the distributed nature of the process also makes measuring how
much carbon was actually removed from the atmosphere more difficult.

The first challenge is knowing precisely how much carbon dioxide has been
trapped in the soil thanks to the added basalt. That can vary depending on
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local weather conditions, soil chemistry, the exact properties of the basalt, and
other factors. Lithos currently monitors how its basalt dust is dissolving using
instruments placed on every 2.5 acres of land. But that’s expensive, even
across a relatively small number of farms. Yap hopes that Frontier’s purchase
will make it possible to collect enough data to eventually replace some of that
testing with computer models.

Another challenge is that carbon sucked up by basalt reactions doesn’t

necessarily stay locked up for long. It’s a long journey from, say, an Illinois
farm to the Gulf of Mexico, through groundwater, rivers, and wetlands. A lot
can happen on that journey, including some carbon dioxide getting released
back into the atmosphere, says David Ho, an oceanographer at the University
of Hawaii. (Ho was texting with WIRED from a ship in the northeast Atlantic,
where he is investigating related questions about air and water interactions.)

Simulations of ocean chemistry are generally good at predicting the fate of

bicarbonates. But the process of getting to the sea is significantly murkier,
given the complexities of water flows and different chemical environments. Ho,
who cofounded a nonprofit called [C]Worthy that is developing tools for
validating CDR techniques, calls the uncertainty “huge.” Lithos is among those
working on simulations of how the bicarbonate ions behave in rivers, part of
what Yap describes as a “cradle-to-grave” model of the weathering process.
Ho calls the startup's approach among “the most promising” of carbon removal
strategies. Yet he also questions the appropriateness of corporations like those
behind Frontier using purchases of nascent CDR techniques to meet their
climate commitments. Ho thinks there’s too much uncertainty in calculating the
exact amount of carbon they remove, and a lack of independent verification.
“It’s kind of like marking their own homework,” says David Beerling, director of
the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Mitigation and a biogeologist who has
worked with Lithos’ scientific partners but isn’t involved with the company.

Still, Beerling and Ho both say the funds from Frontier’s Lithos deal will help
push enhanced rock weathering toward the point where companies and
governments feel confident that it works, by jump-starting data collection on
the technique. “The great thing about these large deployments is that it forces
them to solve the logistical challenges,” Beerling says. “How do you get the
rock down? How do you get farmer buy-in? How do you sample the fields?
How do you process all that data?”
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Those logistical questions loom large for Yap. To farmers, Lithos is essentially
a fertilizer supplier, selling a dusty substance that is claimed to improve fields
and replace limestone, with side benefits to the climate. “The way we position
ourselves is actually as an agriculture company,” Yap says.

Lithos is initially enticing customers by offering to sprinkle basalt on farmland

for free. The company collects basalt waste from quarries—there isn’t much
market for the fine dust—and transports it by truck to the nearby fields of its
farmer partners. After the basalt has been applied, fields are monitored
carefully not just for carbon uptake but also for changes in crop productivity,
which depends on the specific plants and soils in a location, and the chemical
composition of local basalt. Lithos currently operates in seven states across
the US.

Yap says she already has a lengthy waiting list of farmers, representing
enough acreage to capture potentially hundreds of thousands of tons of
carbon. The proposition can be appealing because it means no longer paying
for limestone to add to soil. Lithos expects to get more cost-efficient as it
scales up, and Yap says that costs are already falling, but to reach the $100
per ton goal set by Frontier, farmers may need to be willing to pay for basalt
deliveries themselves.

If Lithos can get through that bottleneck, scaling up will inevitably bring other
challenges. Among them will be ensuring that large amounts of bicarbonate-
rich runoff don’t disturb local ecosystems, and grappling with the
environmental and health impacts of moving large volumes of basalt dust over
greater distances. Some analyses have found that if the transportation
demands grow too high, the carbon benefits of weathering can be erased
entirely. Ho says that’s all the more reason to proceed with caution, noting that
in the near term, CDR techniques should generally take a backseat to the
more immediate challenge of cutting carbon emissions.

Ranshoff of Frontier says that’s the goal: to identify by 2030 the kinds of
companies that will be ready to scale in time to reach levels of carbon removal
required to meet net zero goals by midcentury. “We're in the process of
learning about something that no one's ever done,” says Yap. “We're learning
as we go.”

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