“The great thing about these large deployments is that it forces them to solve the logistical challenges,” Beerling says. Still, Beerling and Ho both say the funds from Frontier’s Lithos deal will help push enhanced rock weathering toward the point where companies and governments feel confident that it works, by jump-starting data collection on the technique. “It’s kind of like marking their own homework,” says David Beerling, director of the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Mitigation and a biogeologist who has worked with Lithos’ scientific partners but isn’t involved with the company. Ho thinks there’s too much uncertainty in calculating the exact amount of carbon they remove, and a lack of independent verification. Yet he also questions the appropriateness of corporations like those behind Frontier using purchases of nascent CDR techniques to meet their climate commitments. Ho calls the startup's approach among “the most promising” of carbon removal strategies. Ho, who cofounded a nonprofit called Worthy that is developing tools for validating CDR techniques, calls the uncertainty “huge.” Lithos is among those working on simulations of how the bicarbonate ions behave in rivers, part of what Yap describes as a “cradle-to-grave” model of the weathering process. But the process of getting to the sea is significantly murkier, given the complexities of water flows and different chemical environments. Simulations of ocean chemistry are generally good at predicting the fate of bicarbonates. (Ho was texting with WIRED from a ship in the northeast Atlantic, where he is investigating related questions about air and water interactions.) A lot can happen on that journey, including some carbon dioxide getting released back into the atmosphere, says David Ho, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii. It’s a long journey from, say, an Illinois farm to the Gulf of Mexico, through groundwater, rivers, and wetlands. Another challenge is that carbon sucked up by basalt reactions doesn’t necessarily stay locked up for long.
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