Kelly Erhart, Co-Founder and VP of Business Development of Project Vesta, says oceans have been naturally removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for billions of years, but no one has tried to leverage that process and bring it to market.
She has a multifaceted and multidisciplinary background, and Kelly’s work in the last few years has focused on the commercialization of sustainable technologies and climate solutions through both nonprofit and for-profit endeavors.
I think we’re going to be talking about things that a lot of our listeners maybe aren’t familiar with and that will be novel and interesting to them.
I came across this as this incredible solution that seemed to hold so much promise that was cited in every report by the IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when they would talk about how we would achieve targets that keep us below 1.5 degrees warming.
Very cool.
Getting to spend days and days and days on end just by the riverside on the Yellowstone River and watching those natural cycles I think was quite influential at that young age.
And we’ll get more into this later, but if you could also touch on kind of where Project Vesta’s work fits into the whole portfolio of different carbon dioxide removal solutions, that’s something that we can also discuss.
I like to use this analogy of a bathtub, where if you wake up in the morning and you turn on the tap of your bathtub and you leave to go pour a cup of coffee, and you come back and there’s water overflowing.
So, in the United States and all over the world, coastal communities and island nations are bringing in foreign sand for coastal replenishment, and we can replace a portion of that sand with olivine sand to try and provide a solution for coastal projects to be carbon negative and climate resilient.
There’s a lot there that’s really interesting that I think before I had learned anything about olivine, there aren’t a lot of projects or efforts that are kind of similar to this.
Actually, weathering is the process that is truly actually responsible for some of the last ice ages, when there were tectonic events that shifted the tectonic plates and exposed more of this rock to the atmosphere.
And how do think about scaling and commercialization? I mean, obviously there’s an enormous amount of coastline in the world, and I’m sure the long-term vison is to make this a solution that people can use in all kinds of different locations.
And, yeah, it does require a lot of resource in terms of bringing a billion tons of rocks around the world to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide, but this is not an industry that’s outside of the scale of other industries that have been created before.
Years ago, before the forestry carbon credit industry sprung up, and then hundreds of millions of dollars and many, many organizations came together to try and figure out what those variables are that we need to define to really understand that there’s carbon removal happening by growing trees.
Can we talk a little about where Vesta fits into other carbon removal solutions? You talked about ambient carbon capture from a handful of companies that are trying to do that now.
So that in a nutshell is the short-term carbon cycle, and permanence—or kind of how long a carbon that we remove from the atmosphere stays removed from the atmosphere—is a really critical variable to be looking at when we’re talking about long-term climate impact.
Right.
Again, thinking about the scale implications of delivering direct air capture at billion tons scale is concerning, and you do have that transportation issue as well.
There are so many different approaches to carbon capture, can you talk a little about the cooperation in the industry generally—how networked are companies that are taking different approaches? Do you talk to companies that do other things and talk about how each approach has a different role, or is it more siloed? Just curious to hear how sort of cooperation versus competition works in this area.
Because when you look at the problem, I think it’s easy to want – your brain wants to jump to: what’s going to fix this? What’s the solution that’s going to fix this? And in reality, there just isn’t a solution that’s going to fix it.
And there’re so many interesting things that come up around this topic and the way that your solution at Project Vesta can be helpful.
When you’re selling carbon credits, you have to be able to prove that you’ve removed carbon from the atmosphere and kept it out of the atmosphere, right? And right now, there’s not a validated way to do that in the ocean, so our team is busy at work defining that, and we’ve been working so far with corporations that are interested in making big climate commitments.
And when you talk to corporations, what do you note about just the—I don’t know if it is fair to call them challenges or what’s basically the process of getting them informed about what you’re doing? I’m assuming not everybody is familiar with olivine sand and the approach that you’re taking.
So supporting by buying a little bit of permanent carbon removal that’s more expensive and then buying a larger portion of their portfolio in air emissions, renewable energy credits, and maybe some of the cheaper forestry credits, but still supporting in small ways the more engineered solutions.
So it’s – a large part of our process right now is to find the right kind of community engagement process so that we’re including stakeholders at every level of the chain, whether they’re the regulators or the people that live on the coastline, and engaging in just participatory governments, workshops, and anything that’s kind of contextually right for that area.
That’s been an interesting challenge, and, you know, just the whole concept in itself is a challenging scientific opportunity where we, as I mentioned, are kind of on the cutting edge of ocean geochemistry and how we measure it and how we know that what we know is happening geologically, how can we really define that with very distinct variables? How can we bring more accuracy into this? I think the other challenges, as I mentioned, are around permitting and just that that can sometimes be slower than we’d like.
I think that was a big thing that came out of COVID of just people noticing that it was time to apply their efforts where they felt passionate and kick them into gear.
And we’ve been a remote team since we’ve started, which is fascinating rolling into COVID and continuing to be a remote team and then growing from a team of 4 to a team of 15 or 35, depending on how you slice it.
And so I wanted to frame this in a slightly different way, which is—the more you kind of read about the climate crisis, whether it’s popular articles or books, there’s a lot of kind of negativity, dread, some kind of despair that filters in too.
And the more that you dig into the problem, yes, the more grim you can see the projections are, but if any of the listeners haven’t yet read Project Drawdown and taken a look at that book, it’s a fantastic book that catalogs a lot of climate solutions.
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