Vesta Coastal Carbon Capture

By funding this project you are contributing to their work. You will receive impact reports and measurements but you won't receive a carbon credit.

After 3.5 years of lab-based research, Vesta launched the world’s first-ever field trials of Coastal Carbon Capture. Vesta’s NY site is part of a coastal protection project, coupling climate adaptation and mitigation. Vesta is also developing a marsh restoration application, through our collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, National Park Service, and US Geological Survey on a saltmarsh pilot experiment. Preliminary results from fieldwork continue to demonstrate Coastal Carbon Capture's potential as a planetary-scale, nature-based climate solution.

In order to keep global warming as close to 1.5C as possible, reduction of carbon dioxide emissions alone will not be sufficient, we must also remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Vesta's innovative deployment of coastal enhanced weathering has enormous potential for cheap, permanent carbon capture at a massive scale. At scale, Coastal Carbon Capture could remove more than a gigatonne (1 billion tonnes +) of CO2 from the atmosphere annually while locally reducing ocean acidity.

Coastal Carbon Capture is a nature-based carbon removal process that enhances the ocean’s natural capacity to sequester and store carbon dioxide. It works by adding the common mineral olivine to coastal areas, where it dissolves and accelerates the Earth’s long-term carbon removal process, the carbonate-silicate cycle. The dissolution of olivine in seawater causes a natural chemical reaction wherein atmospheric CO2 is sequestered into seawater as bicarbonate, permanently storing carbon in this safe, alkaline form.

There are over 30 years of lab-based research and academic support towards the massive potential for this scalable nature-based climate solution. Vesta built on these studies, first through years of lab-based experiments, and now, having observed no adverse ecological effects, by conducting rigorous demonstration pilots. Vesta’s deployments have furthered recommendations by the National Academies of Sciences and NOAA’s Carbon Dioxide Removal report, which highlight the solution’s immense potential.

19 Mar 2022

USA