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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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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.