Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and net negativity are crucial to any carbon dioxide removal technology. At megatonne scale, including our own deployment of solar farms and the associated emissions, our process can remain over 70% efficient based on our latest modeling and third-party evaluation.
As with some of the other tweaks to the traditional ERW process, we have made modifications from the start to minimize our footprint. Considering that the transport and grinding of heavy minerals are two of the largest drivers of the ERW footprint, we plan to do the following to reduce our footprint:
- Instead of bringing minerals to the farms, we bring the farm to the minerals. Our current farms are on the other side of the valley where the olivine mine is located.
- Our model is designed, however, so the process remains viable for hundreds of kilometers.
- Our LCA and prior ones carried out do not yet consider electric trucks (which we expect to be on the market and reasonably priced in the next 5 years).
- We have identified numerous future sites representing the scale of hundreds of thousands of hectares all within short transport distances to our mineral reserves.
Here is an image on the factors that affect CO2 budget of terrestrial enhanced weathering:
