By Ed Ballard | June 22, 2023 10:48 am ET | The Wall Street Journal
Fast-growing trees, volcanic dust, ocean tweaks: Startups get creative in efforts to fight global warming
Reducing emissions won’t be enough to reach international goals for limiting global warming, many climate experts say—it will also require removing billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year.
To get there, scientists and startups are working on ways to tweak natural processes that already suck up carbon to enhance their utility as a carbon sink.
A Market for Dust
One natural process that sequesters carbon is known as rock weathering. Rainwater, which is slightly acidic because it contains dissolved carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, slowly breaks down some rocks, such as volcanic basalt. The process traps CO2 as bicarbonate, which eventually flows to the sea to be stored for millennia. Seattle-based Lithos Carbon is one of several startups trying to fast-track that process by spreading ground-up basalt on the soil.
It will take plenty of dust. Lithos wants to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air by 2030, a target that it says could take 4 billion tons of basalt—roughly half the weight of all the coal burned worldwide in 2022.
Lithos expects to remove around 20,000 tons of CO2 this year, working with farmers in the U.S., Brazil, Europe and elsewhere. It pays quarry owners for basalt dust, a mining byproduct, then pays farmers to spread it. For them, basalt dust is an alternative to the lime used on acidic soil. (Continue to The Wall Street Journal for the full article)
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