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And it involves dumping 9,000 tons of fancy sand off the North Carolina coast.
When visitors flock to the beach this summer in Duck, North Carolina, a small, 6-mile long town on the Outer Banks, they may catch a glimpse of a climate experiment happening among the waves.
About 1,500 feet offshore, a company called Vesta will be pouring 9,000 tons of sand into the sea and watching carefully to see what happens next. This finely crushed rock will not be of the typical Outer Banks variety. Instead, it will consist of a mineral called olivine, which should enhance the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere — and lock it away for thousands of years.
That the experiment can go ahead at all marks a milestone for ocean-based carbon removal, a category of climate solutions that prod the ocean into sucking up more CO2. A big obstacle for the field has been the lack of a legal framework for permitting real-world trials — U.S. laws governing the ocean weren’t written with the prospect of intentionally altering its chemistry to address an existential environmental crisis in mind. But after an 18-month interagency review process, Vesta is now the first company with a federal permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deploy a stand-alone carbon removal test in U.S. waters.
Though 9,000 tons may sound like a lot, this is still a relatively small-scale pilot designed to assess how effective the olivine is in driving carbon removal, as well as observe any other changes in the environment and develop methods for tracking the movement of the sand in the water. These kinds of field trials are essential to establishing which marine carbon removal methods have potential and which don’t.
“We want to measure everything very carefully at this stage and make sure that we are fully understanding the safety profile and the carbon removal data from this project,” Tom Green, Vesta’s CEO, told me. But the company has big aspirations. If things go well, he said, maybe olivine could be used for beach nourishment projects all over the country, where sand is deposited along the shore to address erosion. “Imagine the carbon removal possibilities if we did that with olivine sand,” he said. “We could quickly become the largest technique for permanent carbon removal that's out there.”
Scientists generally agree that stopping global warming this century will require both reducing emissions and taking carbon out of the atmosphere. The sheer size of the ocean and its natural ability to store vast amounts of carbon make it an enticing place to look for solutions.
Dumping thousands of tons of non-native sand into the ocean may not sound like the most convincing option — especially since the ocean is already “experiencing unprecedented destabilizing changes through massive warming, acidification, deoxygenation, and a host of resulting effects,” according to an open letter published last year and signed by hundreds of scientists. However, despite this — or perhaps because of it — the letter called for accelerating research to find out whether any of the proposed ocean-based carbon removal methods, including releasing large quantities of ground olivine, are viable.
Olivine is an abundant mineral with special properties. When it comes into contact with seawater, it drives a chemical reaction that converts CO2 gas into more stable forms of carbon that can’t readily return to the atmosphere. This in turn creates a deficit of CO2 in the surface waters, which triggers the ocean to take up more from the atmosphere in order to maintain equilibrium.
Reactions like this are happening constantly in the ocean already, but on very slow timescales. Vesta’s innovation is to speed up the process by crushing and deploying olivine strategically where the wind and waves can most efficiently weather it away.
The site of an earlier Vesta test project in the Hamptons.Courtesy of Vesta
Olivine could address the harms of CO2 pollution in more ways than one. The ocean already absorbs about 30% of the carbon released into the atmosphere each year, which has made the water more acidic and less hospitable to many of its inhabitants. But when olivine triggers these reactions, it can act as a sort of antacid. This approach to carbon removal is also known as enhancing the ocean’s alkalinity and olivine is just one of a number of different ways to do it. Another company called Planetary is experimenting with adding a different mineral, magnesium hydroxide, to the ocean. Ebb Carbon, on the other hand, is sucking up seawater and running it through a membrane to increase its alkalinity, before returning it to the tides.
Both already have field trials up and running, but instead of trying to conduct stand-alone experiments in the open ocean they’ve hitched onto existing ocean dumping permits. Ebb, for example, has set up at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s facility in Sequim, Washington, where it is releasing treated seawater into wastewater that flows into the bay. Similarly, Planetary is conducting pilot projects at the wastewater outflows of a water treatment facility and power plant in Canada. Other ocean carbon removal companies, such as Los Angeles-based Captura, have opted to move abroad for their early projects and avoid the U.S. permitting puzzle altogether.
Vesta went to Duck because it is among the most studied stretches of coastline in the country. The town is home to an Army Corps coastal field research center known for its long-term data set on the surrounding waters. “Few locations on the globe provide a better archive of wave, water, bathymetry and other forces that shape nearshore conditions,” according to the Army Corps’ website. (“Bathymetry” is the topography of the seafloor.) That means Vesta will be able to get a more accurate picture of any changes the olivine is responsible for.
When Drew Havens, the town manager in Duck, first heard about Vesta’s plans, he was skeptical. “You're dumping something into the ocean, people automatically go to, well, is it going to harm humans? Is it going to be harmful to wildlife or other living organisms?” he told me.
Though some in the town are still nervous, Havens said he has become more comfortable with the idea as the project has been rigorously reviewed by environmental protection regulators at the federal and state level. Vesta’s scientists also engaged with the town council, did an open house for members of the public, and have generally invited questions and open dialogue.
Just because regulators have determined that the risks of this pilot project are low, however, doesn’t mean using olivine for carbon removal is risk-free. For one, the rock has to be mined — in this case, from a quarry in Norway, although it is also found in the U.S. — and transported to the project site. That’s likely to produce some environmental impacts, though the company estimates that the project will ultimately remove about 10 times more CO2 from the atmosphere than the emissions associated with running the experiment, including the mining and shipping of olivine.
But the biggest risk with mined olivine is that it contains nickel, said Jaime Palter, an associate professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who has no affiliation with Vesta. Nickel can act as both a nutrient and a toxin for phytoplankton, she told me, so it's important to study whether putting olivine in the ocean will result in adverse effects.
Vesta has been closely examining that possibility. In fact, the project in Duck will be the company’s second U.S. field trial. In the summer of 2022, Vesta got permission from the town of Southampton in Long Island to spread olivine on the beach as part of a larger sand replenishment project that was already in the works. Vesta’s scientists worked with local academic partners at Cornell, SUNY Stony Brook, and Hamilton College to do extensive monitoring both before and after the sand was placed, collecting data on more than 20 indicators of the effects on the water, sediment, and ecology.
The company has since published two annual reports on the project. It is still awaiting analysis of many of the samples, but so far, the results have been promising, Green said. There has been no sign of trace metal accumulation in Eastern Oysters, a species known to accumulate pollutants from their environment, for instance. There was also no significant difference in water quality between control areas and the sites with olivine, and trace metal concentrations were below the relevant EPA water quality guidelines. The area’s benthic macrofauna — critters like clams and small crustaceans that live on or near the seafloor — were as abundant and various as before.
Notably, the tests also showed evidence of an increase in alkalinity in the waters of the olivine-treated area, which is the key reaction that leads to carbon removal. But Green said there’s more work to be done in terms of calculating where and when removal may have happened.
There’s also more work to be done to understand the effects of olivine in different environments, which brings us back to Duck. There, it will be deposited in 25-foot deep water instead of on the beach, helping Vesta to further refine its data and measurement methods. The plan is to continue testing and collecting data at the site for at least two years. The company declined to comment on the budget for the project. Vesta is funded primarily by venture capital investors but also raises money for research through an affiliated nonprofit.
Vesta may have been the first to get a federal permit to run a marine carbon removal test, but it definitely won’t be the last. Nikhil Neelakantan, a senior project manager at Ocean Visions, which is a nonprofit that advocates for ocean-based climate solutions, told me there are a number of other domestic projects in the pipeline, including more than a dozen government-funded research projects. The White House also recently set up a marine carbon removal fast track action committee with the mandate to create recommendations for policy, permitting, and regulatory standards for both research and implementation.
Neelakantan said there is work to do on clarifying the role of different agencies in regulating ocean carbon removal, and which laws apply to each method.
“This is an early first step, and it's exciting to see that it's finally going to come to fruition,” he said, of Vesta’s project in Duck. “I think there's momentum with this federal task force. It's going to be the first of many others that will happen soon.”
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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.