Olivine is a mineral that can sequester carbon dioxide through weathering. It's also one of the most common minerals in the Earth's upper mantle. A lot of it is just sitting around as waste rock from other mining operations. Project Vesta is working to turn olivine from waste into value, reverse climate change, and deacidify the world's oceans. Project Vesta cofounder Eric Matzner comes on the show to tell us how that works and what they're up to.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon. Thanks for joining us. Today I have with us Eric Matzner, co-founder of Project Vesta. Eric, thanks for joining us. What is Project Vesta?
Eric Matzner: Hi, Ross. Thanks for having me. Project Vesta is a project to help remove CO2 from the atmosphere by accelerating the weathering of a special type of rock on beaches.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that was very succinct. Yes, that is my understanding from reviewing your materials as well. A colleague of mine, Paul Gamble, nudged me the other day and said, hey, this nonprofit just left stealth mode. You should check this out. So what have you been working on and how exactly does your project work?
Eric Matzner: Well, our project works in the same method that Earth works to remove CO2 in the carbon cycle. So if you haven’t studied geology or carbon cycle recently, basically volcanoes put up CO2, goes in the air, interacts with water, It becomes an acidic, rains down on rocks. Those rocks that are made from volcanic materials then run into the ocean and become materials for corals, calcium carbonate that is used in the shells. Those shells then turn into corals and limestone. That limestone eventually gets solidified. Subducted down under the sea. And in a few million years, it could come up again as a volcano.
So that means there is a process for Earth to remove CO2. And so we know that the last three ice ages have been caused by exposure and weathering of volcanic or ultramathic rock around the equator. And so we’re looking to harness Earth’s natural process to make it better, faster, and more optimal because we can choose a location and the right type of rock, which Earth cannot.
Ross Kenyon: In reviewing your materials, I saw that we have to mine this rock, this olivine, and then place it strategically in places that would allow it to weather correctly in the right way, to be moved around in the right way, to absorb the greatest amount of carbon dioxide. Is that correct?
Eric Matzner: That is correct. Fortunately, with the mining, the rock itself is the most abundant mineral on Earth. It makes up over 50% of the upper mantle. So we’re talking about a rock called olivine. And there’s a couple different types. We’re looking at one that’s magnesium silicate, which is also known as forsterite. And there’s these formations called dunite. Sorry for all these geological terms. I had to learn all of them in this...
Ross Kenyon: No, it’s okay. It makes us feel smart. It’s good to hear these.
Eric Matzner: Yes. Well, I don’t mean to use big words. It’s just these are the words. So then there’s a formation called Dunite that’s 90% pure olivine. And so the idea is there’s reserves on every continent and every country, not every country, but every continent and near every country. And so the idea is we could take that rock and then put it onto beaches because part of the problem in the speed of the weathering is... The silicate coating builds up on the outside. And so you need to tumble the rocks. And so to break that coating off, and you can accelerate it by a magnitude, so like around 1,000 times the natural weathering rate.
And so we put it on these energetic shelf seas, There’s a lot of room for tumbling and bedsheer forces underwater, whatever, you know, where they can drag the rock and break this coating off and cause collisions and break in even smaller particles. We can then make it so that these things, whether in a year or two or five maximum realistically, and take the CO2 out. So for each ton, this is amazing math here that really got me hooked, is each one ton of the rock, olivine, removes 1. 25 tonnes of CO2 from the air or the water that it’s dissolved in.
Ross Kenyon: Is there a range? Is that one of the bounds? Is that just the average?
Eric Matzner: No. I mean, there’s something called a dynamic equilibrium. So we basically know that this rock will weather completely in X amount of time. And so basically, because there’s unlimited CO2 entering into the ocean, essentially, In this type of reaction, the olivine will continue to weather until it’s gone. And that’s just stokiochemistry kind of stuff like that, where it is a reaction that will occur. If the surface of the olivine is exposed, it will weather. Even crazier things or wilder things that aren’t even fully calculated in any lab experiments, which is things like lugworms in the shallow water can eat the grains and weather it a thousand times extra.
So we have all these, and there’s bacteria on the land that break it down further and release different acids that reward the plant for breaking, you know, fungi reward plant for breaking it down. There’s all sorts of symbiotic relationships with these nutrients and nature and water and in this process of removing CO2 and putting it into marine animal shells.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that’s exciting. I’ve been hearing about Olivine for a long time. Wait, is it Olivine or Olivine? Are you saying both?
Eric Matzner: I may be saying both because I read it and then I’ve heard other people say it different ways. So I think I say it weird, I say Olivine, but I believe it might be Olivine.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I’m going to go with Olivine. It sounds a little bit like a shampoo, but that’s okay. Someone’s going to correct me at a conference, I’m sure, but I’m sticking with Olivine for now.
Eric Matzner: Yeah, well, I think you’re fair to use it either way. That happens sometimes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely possible. Well, what happens now with your group? So is there a way that people can pay to have this done? Are you in a testing phase? What’s happening?
Eric Matzner: Yeah, great question. So we have a multi-front approach to this problem and process because we have the actual physical idea of the beaches to weather. But part of what we’re doing here is making a movement, getting people involved, changing Okay, let’s cut our emissions, but stop just waiting. Let’s start taking them out. Let’s attack this equation from the other side, which is something I think other people are fearful to discuss because they’re worried that it might stop people from cutting We are responsible in the U. S. for more CO2 in the atmosphere than India.
We are terribly ahead in this worst race ever. So we need to get ahead in this race to remove it and to get this carbon out. And so what we’re doing is we want to start a movement. And part of that movement is that we’re going to use jobs. So we want everyone to be wearing olivine necklaces, jewelry, bracelets. And when you pay us, so olivine is about $25 a ton. And so the average US person’s CO2 output they’re responsible for is about 18 tonnes. So around $300, we can dump 15 or more tonnes of olivine on the beach if you buy that necklace.
So we’re not at that stage yet because we don’t have beaches, but we’re selling a smaller necklace called a grain of hope right now at our launch, which is a single grain of olivine stuck in a time sand time vial on a necklace. So it’s like we are here, but we have a way to stop time from running out or at least give us more time to remove the CO2. And that’s why it’s called the grain of hope.
Ross Kenyon: I see. And I have also seen pictures. I don’t know if these are simulated or if this has been done somewhere, but the beaches are now green.
Eric Matzner: So that’s not simulated. That’s a natural olivine beach. That one is in Hawaii that’s on our website is Mahana Beach or Papakolea. And that’s a volcano opened up and just dumped all its olivine on the beach there. And so we know these beaches are safe. There’s another one in the Galapagos. There’s about three or four other known ones around the world. That one in Hawaii is particularly accessible and particularly beautiful.
Ross Kenyon: One of the questions I have is, I believe beaches are public property typically in the United States. There must be private beaches too, but how do property rights interact with this solution?
Eric Matzner: So you’d be surprised actually how many beaches there are. There’s very profitable beaches in terms of tourism and other things like that, but many beaches around the world are not accessible by even roads. And many of them have rocks and don’t have desirable sand.
Unknown speaker: Thank you so much.
Eric Matzner: We have a lot of infrastructure like railway or an easy access port to remove it so we can lower the CO2 output of the transport, which is around 4% loss. So, you know, for every 1. 25 tonnes of CO2, we’re losing like the 0. 05. And so the idea is to minimize those costs. Like some of our early things will be to take like piles called tailing piles, waste piles of all of, you know, already sitting on the sites of mines already dug up. So we’re not calculating that we have that CO2.
Only the transport, not even just the mining. Any animals or any other sort of right of way that’s necessary. And so the math, which is also amazing, is so it’s 2% of the shelf seas of the whole world. So it’s not that much. On a realistic scale, it’s a volume of seven kilometers cubed or approximately less than one meter per person of olivine per year to offset all of humanity’s CO2 for that year. That’s a big number. You know, it’s a number. I would say, first of all, we’re not starting right there.
We’re going to start with the beach. But don’t be overwhelmed by the top line number because when you actually look at how much coal we mine and how much oil equivalents we mine, it’s significantly more. So I don’t like to say that, oh, we can’t go to the same ends that we go to cause these problems to fix them. You have to tell me we should at least go there. And so we’re already mining more than this. So that’s not a reason to tell me that we can’t do it. I find that ridiculous.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, no, I think it’s big and I like the vision of it. I definitely am rooting for this or something like this. We’ve been hearing about the potential for a long time. We did a podcast episode of reversing climate change with Dr. Greg Dippel of University of British Columbia. God, it feels like a lifetime ago. But he was talking about waste rock being used for this from mine tailings. Is olivine a waste rock or would it have to be mine specifically for this purpose?
Eric Matzner: Yeah, I just mentioned that. So it’s sitting on the sidelines of mines already dug up. So it is actually. That will be hopefully where the first olivine and much of the olivine comes from. The question is, is it pure enough, etc.? We also want to push the price of olivine down. So, for example, the cost for a 5,000 ton a day mine in the U. S. , which is the highest labor cost. So part of that means having new mines started. To do the whole world, that seven kilometers cube volume, we need about 30 to 50 mines.
And some people will say there’s not enough rock. There’s a single mine in Bingham Canyon that is a copper mine. It has an excavated volume already and it’s continuing of 25 kilometers cubed. So technically we can do it with one large mine. So don’t tell me that the mines, we don’t have enough rock. Don’t tell me that It takes too long because you haven’t weathered it on a desktop shaker and replaced the water and watched the grain-on-grain collisions. That’s like the other criticism that people miss is that you’re not having the collisions, the water refreshed, and you’re not having the animals that are using the carbon.
So those are the main criticisms. And I think they’re bunk. And I think that what we’re doing is we’re going to prove it. But I invite all of you listening who have in your whole mind this whole time something. There’s this reason. There’s that reason. We are going to do this in an open source way. We’ve hired Delteris, which is an engineering firm, open source in the Netherlands, who’ve done olivine in deltas and other places. And we’re going to put the experiment up before we do it. Their recommendations, their paper, the studies they’re doing, the way it’s being done.
If you want to make a criticism and I want the haters. I want you on our side. I want you to tell me how we can make this better and how we can do it more efficiently and how we can save the freaking planet. So we’re all on the same side at the end of the day. And I’m pro tree planting. I’m pro plastic gathering. We need a war on all fronts to remove carbon, to remove pollutants and to restore the planet. And that’s what we’re here to do at Project Vesta.
Ross Kenyon: I respect the open source ethos. I feel the same way. Well, what should we expect moving forward? What stage are you at right now and what’s coming in the next year or so?
Eric Matzner: So right now we’ve just come out of stealth mode. We are recruiting. We have some scientists who’ve done olivine dissolution kinetic research already on our team. We want more. We want some of those haters to convert to lovers and to help direct their energy into making this project a reality. So hit us up, projectvesta.org. There’s sections. We want all those criticisms and rebuttals to be discussed. We’re going to throw up some forums, let you hash it out here, but we want to really see how we can make this happen.
So the first step is getting a sample test beach nearby somewhere where there’s Olivine Mine or Tailings Piles. And so the only requirements we have, you’re out there and you have beaches or you have science abilities to run these studies and different things. It needs to be warm, humid tropics. The faster, the warmer it is, the more humid it is. And the greater the energy of the ocean in that area, and hopefully a shelf sea, the quicker the olivine will break down and the better our experimental numbers will be. And so that’s our short-term goal.
And then the next one is to go like, we have a four to five Phase plan. We may forego our early plan is to have like a tank on the beach that just can tell us the weathering rate. But we’re concerned that we’re going to spend all this time and money and then people are going to say, well, that’s just a tank. It’s not a full beach. And they’re going to take away from it. So we may just jump right to a small test beach. And then we’ll go regional. Then we’ll go country level.
And we would have people like Costa Rica who wants to offset and they have 300 days of renewable energy, but they’re responsible for eight tonnes of CO2 just from cars on the island, which are not going So if you’re Costa Rican and you’re in the government, hit us up. We’ll help you out. You’ve got lots of coastlines. You’re in the tropics. We’re looking for these kind of synergistic effects there where we can solve the problem by dumping our olivine there, bringing the olivine. And then there’s regional ones. So there’s an area near the UK where they do 4% of the world’s CO2.
The country’s around the southern bite of the North Sea. We could dump... 1. 2 gigatons of olivine there. We don’t even need beaches. We can do it right in the sea because there’s enough bedshear forces. And we can offset 5% of the world’s CO2 there. So we’ve got a regional one for you in Europe there. There’s a whole paper on it. And then we also can go global. And that’s the idea of having partnerships for countries with cheap labor and no good exports that can start mining olivine, provide it to the They’re neighbor on the coastline.
And then we have a project that spans the boundaries of our planet because the climate spans boundaries. And we need to team up together to solve this global problem. And so that’s kind of our vision is to go incrementally up until the whole world. So we’re getting that seven kilometers cubed volume each year and maybe even beyond so that we can bring our CO2 levels back to 1850 pre-industrial levels, 280 parts per million, because today we’re at 411 and it’s not good.
Ross Kenyon: Well, great. That sounds like there’s a lot to do, especially if you’re a hater. Hopefully you’re a lover. A lot of worry about the haters, Eric. I think it’s okay. I think you’re talking to a friendly audience here. But that was Eric Matzner, co-founder of Project Vesta. You can find them at projectvesta.org. Eric, thank you so much for being here with us.
Eric Matzner: Great, Ross. Thank you so much for having us. And just a note on the haters is that the lovers, they speak much more quietly usually than the haters do. So I want the haters to know I know they’re out there and I’ve heard what all of them say and it’s tired. Come up with something more creative, all right? Because we’re going to do this and I want your help and I want the whole world’s help and we need to make it happen. So less hate, more love. Let’s make this a reality.
Ross Kenyon: All right. You heard it here first, haters. So I’m sure you have persuaded them to come check it out. And yeah, good criticism is very valuable to have. Having people give you praise feels good, but it’s also more valuable for people to offer good constructive criticism. So if that’s you, if you like digging into the technical details of stuff like this, Project Vesta would welcome your assistance. And thank you for listening.
