How Big Tech is using rocks to reach net zero and combat climate change

so the first thing we're going to do is turn our spinner blades on you can already see a streak where we've already spread out there Rick Bennett is a third generation farmer trying his hand at a new type of fertilizer Crush volcanic rock known as Basalt the rock dust is considered waste but one startup is finding new use for it to tackle a clim crisis workers here affectionately call this Brown Mountain lithos carbon considers it gold this material is what's chemically reacting with carbon dioxide to permanently capture and sequester it into a form that takes it out of the atmosphere it's a process that happens naturally over thousands of years lithos carbon is spreading it on farms to accelerate it to 2 years backed by a $57 million investment from Frontier a Consortium of companies that includes meta and JP MO there are some portions of company emissions that you will just never Abate recognizing that they have a net zero Target and they want to actually get to zero and honor their very public commitments they have to invest in some sort of removal technology scientists say it's not enough to reduce carbon emissions but capture them with CO2 one of the leading causes of climate change which is why hundreds of companies are pouring into the carbon removal space the question is which can scale up quickly cheaply with with the future of our environment at stake this is what's next in carbon [Music] removal we've got drill rigs prepping for the next shot we've got blasters in here loading for a shot this Quarry is so busy uh we blast a couple times a week out here and that could drop 50 to 60,000 tons of rock at a time onto the ground how far down are we right now we're about 100 foot down in this active pit state of North Carolina we can mine down to 500 ft deep so we're going to be here a very long time mining this product this fight against climate change begins with one of the most abundant resources on the planet Basalt has long been considered the building blocks used in Asphalt and concrete Sunrock Quarry in North Carolina has so much of it it ships out millions of tons every year we take that 36 in Bow and we crush it down to sand siiz particles that we can put into asphalt and concrete and from that surge pile it'll get crushed again it'll get screened it'll get washed and it'll kind of continue on that process until it gets to a final product size in Spec and stockpiled Sunrock uses every piece of that rock except the dust of waste that piles up in the end this is the secret size this is what we looked all over the country for is this this particular material not Alba salt is the quality that lithos wants can you tell by just looking at it or do you actually have to you can't yeah so we look at under an electron microscope we're looking at all the properties that make it suitable for the carbon capture process and also release the nutrients that that the that helps the soil and the plants growing in it as well it's part of a process called enhanced Rock weathering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere combines with rainwater to create a weak form of acid rain when that rain hits volcanic rocks it leads to a chemical re reaction that traps CO2 it's a natural process that takes thousands of years lithos carbon is speeding that up more than 1,000 Times by spreading the finest form of rock dust across Farm Fields the thinking is the more surface area the Rocks cover the more carbon is captured lithos says all of the rain combined with balts also helps improve crop yields Farms are extra and extra powerful for a few reasons one The Roots they break up the rock dust faster so that's great two the farmers already need to spread Rock dusts in their fields they need to do this to rehabilitate their soils after we use synthetic fertilizers but Farmers they're already spreading rock dust and we're actually replacing something they already do today with something that works even better so it's plugging into existing infrastructure piggybacking on that and allowing us to scale this climate crisis faster so the drill goes in it pulls the dirt right up into the bucket the soil is manually tested every 2 Acres every 6 months to measure the amount of carbon captured enhanced Rock weathering is one of many solutions in a growing industry with demand projected to quadruple from 2030 to 2040 according to consulting firm BCG there are already more than 220 carbon removal companies GL there's multiple different Pathways chemical Pathways for which you can take CO2 out of the air and no one really knows for sure yet which ones are going to be able to scale the fastest and come down the price curve most effectively and so it really starts to become a complicated puzzle of which Technologies work in the right atmospheres or in the right uh environments to to optimize all of this and we need some of all of them this satellite image of carbon in the atmosphere points to the scale of the problem humans have dumped two trillion tons of CO2 into the air pushing global temperatures more than 2° above pre-industrial levels the UN panel on climate change says we need to remove up to 10 billion tons per year by 2050 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change that amounts to roughly 25% of annual carbon emissions today most expect that many of those emissions will be eliminated through various reduction measures so more efficient Motors cleaner power Etc but there is still a large amount of emissions that ultimately will have to be taken out of the atmosphere in some way if we want to get to Net Zero that's where carbon removal comes in even with all of the efforts to decarbonize bcg's current mystery estimates companies will still fall more than 30% short of their goal to be truly Net Zero that means they'll need to buy carbon credits from companies like lithos to offset emissions they can't reduce on their own I think all of these sort of Front Runners in the carbon Market they're not just interested in what they can buy today they're investing in the future of the carbon dioxide remove Market the scale of the problem they recognize that investment is needed so they are looking to kind of support Pathways there are a lot of ways to remove carbon but there's a trade-off between affordability and reliability direct air capture has the simplest me measuring system but it requires building large factories that can suck CO2 out of the air it costs up to $1,000 to capture a ton of carbon methods that rely on agricultural waste are considered cheaper but it requires a lot of land enhanced Rock weathering uses a smaller footprint but critics say there's too much uncertainty there isn't enough data to show how effective the process is planting trees may be economical but mystery says the carbon storage is isn't as permanent precise measurements are harder to come by you can estimate how much carbon is in the tree but there are questions like what happens if it gets cut down what happens if there's a forest fire and so in all of these Technologies they all have various pros and cons but in general the higher quality ones or the higher durability ones are the ones that are closer to I can touch and feel and I I can see this much has been removed and someone can put a stamp on it another question related to that is what is the relative value or quality of the different credits right buyers want to have confidence that they are purchasing actual carbon that's been removed they don't want to purchase something and then find out they didn't actually remove on their behalf it's a big reason why companies with the most aggressive climate commitments are backing new technologies BCG estimates this Market could reach as high as $135 billion by 2040 bcg's invested its own money signing Partnerships with direct air capture companies like clim Works to remove more than 140,000 tons of CO2 combined from the atmosphere companies from alphabet to JP Morgan have invested more than $57 million in lithos as part of a Consortium known as Frontier the funds agreed to buy 154,000 tons of carbon from lithos in the next few years combined Frontiers committed to buying nearly a billion dollars of carbon by the end of the decade this is basically a group of players coming together or a single large buyer making the commitment to a company that I will buy your off tape you see large Tech players you see large industry Giants come together and say I will buy this the company can then go to the bank and say look I have a signed letter that someone will buy this I will have revenue and that der risks the project we are moving so much material that anything that we can do to optimize the movement of that helps so part of these large optic agreements what they allow us to do is start leveraging more efficient methods of transportation like rail or like barge those methods can be extremely extremely efficient but you need to move a lot more minimum volume to get [Music] there impact is still hard to quantify though companies are required to measure and verify carbon credits that are sold one of the most important things is that clear mrv the monitoring report and verification if you can clearly articulate and and prove that you have captured a ton when you say you've captured a ton but there's not a universal standard right now correct that's correct and it gets really tricky when you start to look at different Technologies with enhanced Rock weathering you basically you take rocks you scatter them and these rocks will absorb CO2 and in these situations where you have the capture occurring over it could be Acres it could be thousands of Acres you can't possibly measure measure every single Rock right so how do you sample it and come up with an agreed upon number that is the removal that can then be sold soil samples can point to the amount of CO2 captured on farms but that carbon doesn't stay locked up until it makes its way to the ocean where it's sealed off for good so what you actually measure here is not necessarily ultimately what becomes the credit that's correct yeah this is sort of the initial step in the process right what we're measuring here is exactly how fast the rock is dissolving in the field how much carbon dioxide that is pulling down and then we look at all the downstream effects we call it kind of like a CR to grave of accounting right so we look at the effects here we look at what's happening in the rivers we also even model what's happening in the oceans we take all of that into account before we uh kind of say hey here's here's a ton of carbon that we've captured we're doing custom application here uh we're actually applying um B salt and material here for another farmer Farmers like Rick Bennett are keeping a close eye on their fields litho says the tiny rocks are helping improve crop yields by up to 57% in addition to handling and paying for every step of the process lithos pays him farmers get $50 an acre as part of the program what's the result been from a yield perspective has it actually improved the quality of the soil has it improved your yield we have only had one season with it on the land we truly in our test didn't see a yield increase last year but we also did not lose any ground on our yield from the previous year so we're excited to measure the results again this year we think there'll be definitely a yield increase lithos expects to capture up to 50,000 tons of CO2 on farms this year hundreds of other farmers are waiting to partner with the company but they'll need to scale much more than that with demand for carbon credits far outpacing existing supplies in the market our goal is in the next 3 to four years to get as much data as possible that allow us to go the full way models that allow us to say hey we know the soil types we know the crop types we know the climate we see ourselves building something like the Google maps of enhanced weathering from there being able to scale down our measurement costs they really really taking the whole Lon share of profits at the moment scale down those costs reach more Farmers faster scale this up for society the need is so great right we are at the kiloton scale today we need to get to the gigaton scale in the future that is a factor of a million growth today CDR is an optional thing and it's starting to change but until it becomes required it's only going to be limited in to those who are willing to do it voluntarily the only way we can scale the the Technologies as fast as we need is if many of them succeed so this isn't I need daak and not trees this isn't I need enhanced Rock weathering and not biochar this is I need all of it and I need all of them to scale the EU and the US have proposed guidelines to scrutinize the quality of carbon credits in the voluntary Market but mystery says mandating offsets are critical to Bringing costs down a necessary step to getting companies to their Net Zero goals lithos currently charges 300 $70 a ton the goal is to slash that to 100 so our goal is to be capturing billions of tons of carbon dioxide using enhanced Rock weathering we know that's possible our goal is to really be at maybe 2 to six billion tons worldwide how many farms do you need to spread this across how many acres do you need to cover to get to that goal it's not even all the world's farming land it's actually just a fraction of it so in America if we just focus alone on corn and soybean crops and there's many other things we grow obviously but if we just focus on that alone We believe We Could capture up to 7 gigatons so 700 million tons of carbon dioxide so that's the key [Music]

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Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2024