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When we talk about carbon removal, we often focus on “direct air capture” facilities — big factories that suck carbon dioxide out of the ambient air.
But a simpler and easier way to remove carbon from the atmosphere may exist. It’s called “enhanced rock weathering” — grinding up rocks, spreading them out, and exposing them to the ambient air — and it works, essentially, by speeding up the Earth’s carbon cycle. Enhanced rock weathering recently got a major vote of confidence from Frontier, a consortium of tech and finance companies who have teamed up to support new and experimental carbon removal technologies.
Frontier’s members include Stripe, Meta, Alphabet, Shopify, and McKinsey & Company. It aims to buy nearly $1 billion of various forms of carbon removal in the next few years — an intervention meant to spur commercial and investor interest in the sector.
In this episode, Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems expert and professor at Princeton University, and I talk with Jane Flegal, a former Biden White House climate adviser and now the market development and policy lead at Frontier, about the promise of enhanced rock weathering and why Frontier just spent $57 million to do it.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jane Flegal: So enhanced weathering is a carbon removal process that speeds up a natural process which is weathering of alkaline materials. And so weathering happens naturally, it actually drives what makes the earth habitable in the first place. It just happens over very, very long periods. So essentially what happens is that rocks slowly erode when they come into contact with acid rain essentially and —
Robinson Meyer: Naturally acidic rain?
Flegal: Yeah, not like acid rain the way we think of it, rain that is acidic because it has some dissolved CO2. And so that acidic rainwater interacts with rocks and erodes them, and it results in CO2 being stored either as a solid carbonate or as a bicarbonate. So that happens naturally, again, on very long time periods.
Meyer: And I just want to interrupt before we go any further. What then happens, right, is that the CO2 winds up being dissolved as a bicarbonate. It goes into the ocean.
Flegal: Into the ocean.
Meyer: And then what happens? It’s turned into ...
Flegal: It sinks and becomes part of the Earth’s crust.
Meyer: Right. Or it gets turned into a shell, a creature’s shell, and then it sinks again.
Flegal: It is functionally stable. It is thermodynamically pretty much impossible to reverse.
Meyer: And you kind of said this, but I do want to draw it out: This is the carbon cycle. This is a central Earth science process. There’s nothing fancy about this.
Jesse Jenkins: The problem is it takes centuries to play out. It’s just moving on geologic time. But this idea of enhanced weathering means we can potentially speed that up, right?
Meyer: Sorry, I just want to — this is, like, the whole problem of climate change, right? The problem of climate change is that we take fossil fuels and carbon that’s stored in geological storage out of the ground on historic time scales, on decadal ... you know, every year we take millions of tons of it out of the ground, and then it would only be restored back to the ground by this extremely slow process.
Flegal: One way to think about carbon removal is, like, taking stuff out of the fast cycle and putting it into the slow cycle, basically. And essentially, you either inject CO2 underground, where it’s where it’s stable, or you turn it into salt. These are kind of the options.
And so enhanced weathering, to exactly this point, it’s enhanced for a reason, right? There’s regular old weathering, and then there’s the enhanced kind, which aims to speed up this process that typically takes millennia to years or days by either using more reactive materials than the normal rocks that would just weather naturally or increasing the surface area of the material that is exposed to CO2. So grinding up rocks into very, very fine fine powder and exposing that material to more favorable environments.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by Advanced Energy United, KORE Power, and Yale …
Advanced Energy United educates, engages, and advocates for policies that allow our member companies to compete to power our economy with 100% clean energy, working with decision makers and energy market regulators to achieve this goal. Together, we are united in our mission to accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy in America. Learn more at advancedenergyunited.org/heatmap
KORE Power provides the commercial, industrial, and utility markets with functional solutions that advance the clean energy transition worldwide. KORE Power's technology and manufacturing capabilities provide direct access to next generation battery cells, energy storage systems that scale to grid+, EV power & infrastructure, and intuitive asset management to unlock energy strategies across a myriad of applications. Explore more at korepower.com — the future of clean energy is here.
Build your skills in policy, finance, and clean technology at Yale. Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate program is a 10-month online certificate program that trains and connects clean energy professionals to catalyze an equitable transition to a clean economy. Connect with Yale’s expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact. Learn more at cbey.yale.edu/certificate.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.