Mary Yap has been working for the past year and a half to convince farmers to utilize basalt. The volcanic rock is rich in nutrients formed during its crystalline structure from the cooling of magma and can make the soil less acidic. In this way, it is similar to limestone, which farmers often use to improve soil. However, applying basalt requires some precision and is less common. But basalt also comes with an important side benefit: it can automatically absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
Lithos Carbon Project
Lithos Carbon, a company founded by Yap in 2022, is receiving a financial boost of $57.1 million to turn basalt dust into a sustainable climate solution. This funding comes from Frontier, a benefit corporation backed by a group of companies aiming to finance promising approaches to carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. Lithos says it will use the funds to sequester 154,000 tons of carbon dioxide 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 carbon dioxide annually.
Challenges and Opportunities
Options for companies seeking negative emissions are limited. Frontier’s purchases are essentially upfront payments for ideas still in their early stages – often hard to verify or too costly, or both, to attract a large customer base. Nan Ransouhoff, a leader at Frontier and also working in climate at Stripe, says the group starts with small purchases to help promising startups, then transitions to “offtake” agreements for larger quantities of carbon that its members can count towards their emission targets.
Purchasing from Lithos is one of those larger deals. The estimated cost of carbon removal is $370 per ton, with about a quarter of that going towards monitoring the fields and modeling to verify that the carbon is being stored away from the atmosphere for a long time. Ransouhoff says Frontier believes Lithos is on track to meet its carbon dioxide removal goal for customers at a cost of under $100 per ton, at a rate of at least half a billion tons annually. “The most promising” approach.
Rock Weathering Enhancement Technology
Lithos, founded in 2022, is developing a technique called rock weathering enhancement. This technique involves spreading fine basalt dust over fields before planting. As the rock weathers from rain, it interacts with carbon dioxide in the air. Bicarbonate is formed, which locks in carbon by combining it with hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Eventually, the compound is washed into the ocean, where the carbon should remain.
This strategy has the advantage of leveraging what humans are already doing, and Yap says it contrasts with technologies like direct air capture, which involve building industrial plants that suck carbon from the atmosphere. It’s easy to measure the carbon removed this way – it’s captured right there on-site – but critics say it would be difficult to scale because removing enough carbon to make a difference would require thousands of dedicated, resource-intensive facilities.
Using basalt dust for carbon absorption should be easier to scale. There are plenty of fields to spread rock dust on, and plenty of water for the carbon to end up in. However, the distributed nature of the process also makes it more challenging to measure the actual amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere.
Wired Magazine
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