Mary Yap has been working to persuade farmers to adopt basalt for a year and a half. The volcanic rock is rich in nutrients, which are captured during the formation of its crystalline structure from cooling magma, and can make soil less acidic. In this way, basalt is similar to limestone, which farmers often use to improve soil. However, the application of basalt is more complex and less recognized. But basalt also comes with an important side benefit: it can naturally capture carbon from the atmosphere.
Basalt and Climate Change
Yap’s effort is part of decades-long attempts to expand this natural weathering process and prove that it can sequester carbon long enough to affect the climate. “The hurdle is convincing farmers to do it,” says Yap.
Funding Sustainable CO2 Removal Solutions
On Thursday, Yap’s startup, Lithos Carbon, received $57.1 million in support for its efforts to turn basalt dust into a viable climate solution. The funding came from Frontier, a benefactor company backed by a consortium of firms aiming to finance promising approaches to carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. Lithos says it will use the funds to absorb 154,000 tons of CO2 by 2028, by spreading basalt dust over thousands of acres of farmland in the United States. The average car in the U.S. emits about 4 tons of CO2 annually.
Challenges Related to Negative Emissions
Companies seeking negative emissions options are limited. Frontier’s purchases are essentially advance payments for ideas that are still in their infancy – hard to verify or too costly, or both – to attract a large customer base. “What we’re trying to assess in this space is whether it’s on the right path to reach a level that impacts the climate,” according to Nan Ransohoff, who leads Frontier and also works in climate at Stripe. The group starts with small purchases aimed at helping promising startups, then moves to “offtake” agreements for larger quantities of carbon that its members can count toward their emissions targets.
Rock Weathering Enhancement Technology
Lithos was founded in 2022 and is developing a technology called rock weathering enhancement. This involves spreading fine basalt dust over fields before planting. With weathering from rainfall, it interacts with carbon dioxide in the air. Bicarbonate forms, which sequesters carbon by integrating with hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Ultimately, the compound is washed into the ocean, where the carbon should remain.
This strategy has the advantage of leveraging things that humans are already doing, according to Yap. This contrasts with techniques like direct air capture, which involve building industrial plants that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The carbon removed in this way is easily measurable – it is captured there on-site – but critics say it will be hard to scale because removing enough carbon to make a difference will require thousands of dedicated and resource-intensive facilities.
Using basalt dust for carbon capture should be easier to scale. There are plenty of fields to spread the rock dust onto, and there is lots of water where the carbon can end up. However, the distributed nature of the process also makes it challenging to measure how much carbon has actually been removed from the atmosphere.
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