Project Vesta, fiscal partner Far Away Project, is on a mission to harness the natural power of the oceans to remove a trillion tonnes of excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This project is part of TTC’s Climate Action Plan to invest in carbon removal solutions.
Project Vesta’s carbon removal solution accelerates the natural weathering process of our shorelines that results in the storage of carbon in rock. They do this by taking olivine, a readily available green volcanic mineral and placing it on beaches and coastal areas. There, wave action speeds up the carbon dioxide capture process and stores carbon as rock on the sea floor. Thirty years of scientific research has demonstrated that this works and has provided strong evidence that it is a highly affordable and scalable solution. Another benefit of this solution is that it contributes to ocean de-acidification. When olivine dissolves in seawater a chemical reaction takes place that helps reduce acidity. They currently have pilot beaches in the Caribbean, and are studying a natural olivine sand beach in Hawaii. If Project Vesta finds proof that the process works, it plans to share open-source instructions to replicate across coastal areas worldwide.
It’s important to note that olivine is abundant and found naturally occurring near our shelf seas. Project Vesta’s solution captures 20 times more carbon dioxide than the extraction and transportation of the olivine to a coastal site.
Project Vesta estimates that if deployed on just 0.25% of global shelf seas, olivine could capture 1 gigatonne (GT) of carbon dioxide per year. One GT is the amount of carbon that could be sequestered by more than 16 billion tree seedlings grown for 10 years. A grant from TreadRight will go towards lab studies that will monitor the impact of olivine on coastal ecosystems. The results from these studies will be made available to the scientific community to demonstrate that coastal enhanced weathering is a safe intervention.
