1,283 karma · joined November 29, 2011
Previously was running Metalplant, where we use hyperaccumulator plants to mine soil for nickel, while removing carbon dioxide through enhanced rock weathering.
Enhanced weathering works by crushing magnesium-silicate minerals and spreading them into fields to generate alkalinity that forces CO2 to become stored as bicarbonate for 10,000+ years. Olivine is one of the most efficient minerals at this process, but contains trace nickel ~0.3%.
Nickel hyperaccumulator plants grow natively in nickel-bearing soils and draw nickel up from the soil and store it in their biomass as a natural defense against predators. The plants are harvested and processed to pure nickel products. With optimized plants, hundreds of kilograms of nickel can be recovered per hectare per year.
Normally phytomining is as phytoremediation and the soil nickel level depletes, but by utilizing olivine weathering on these soils already containing nickel, we can resupply the nickel as the olivine weathers, stoichemetrically removing gross 300 tonnes of carbon for every tonne of nickel we replenish into the field.
The company was originally developed as a way to demonstrate how to create an economically viable carbon removal technology that creates valuable and important co-products that can drive the upscaling of the process.
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In 2017, I started Climigitation a non-profit think tank dedicated to promoting technologies and techniques to mitigate climate change and remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. Started as a non-profit, it was known as Project Vesta and the idea was to use tropical beaches to speed up Earth's natural long-term carbon-silicate cycle. In early 2021, I left Project Vesta after that, it was split into a non-profit and a for-profit PBC. Vesta has successfully deployed olivine onto beaches in Southhampton New York, and Duck, North Carolina and now focuses on beach nourishment.
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In the biohacking space, I was a "nootropics historian" and started and ran the nootropics company, Nootroo. I helped drive the adoption and acceptance of nootropics and in some ways biohacking in general. You can read a profile of me that is a snapshot from that time of my life in The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/the-brain-bro/497546/ And this is one of the last interviews I did on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwYfsknlWHI You can also find interviews from that time in GQ, Men's Health, ABC Nightline News, NPR, The Guardian, among others. You can see the most accurate definition of nootropics at https://Nootroo.com
MeditationBattleLeague.com - "head-to-head" competitive meditation with EEG headsets.
*This is a personal account and posts here are opinions and do not represent the views of my company/orgs unless otherwise stated.*
Humans are just getting solar power to scale, yet plants pioneered generating energy from the sun billions of years ago. What other technologies and processes can we learn from plants to help set the planet back on the right track?
It won't tell you if the air is being filtered (need MERV13 or better), but a lot of places for efficiency and/or due to old HVAC equipment don't bring in fresh air, which increases the risk in a more confined and/or crowded space.
Also, some places like airplanes, which have HEPA filters and have 10-20 air changes per hour (ACH), don't run those systems at full power or bring in outside air at fast enough rate until airborne, so PPM can't build up to 2000 ppm vs the ~420 ambient outdoor CO2 level and approx 800 "good" indoor air rate.
I use an Aranet4 device, which uses 2 AA batteries that last like a year.
They make the claim so we'll have to see. I currently use a nitric oxide nasal spray as the nose is the major area to protect (and also use probiotic lozenges of the k12 strain for the throat).
--- “The vaccine offers potent protection against transmission, prevents reinfection and the spread of the virus, while also reducing the generation of new variants,” Dr Liu said.
“Unlike the mRNA vaccine which targets only the spike protein, CDO-7N-1 induces immunity to all major SARS-CoV-2 proteins and is highly effective against all major variants to date.
“Importantly, the vaccine remains stable at 4°C for seven months, making it ideal for low- and middle-income countries.” ---
Don't forget that this community has an outsized influence on the world as early adopters and innovators.
We are using natural serpentine soils that have previously been farmed and are idle now due to low productivity and the natural presence of metals like nickel, and which is the native habitat of these plants.
However, to keep your wheat analogy, we currently farm 220 million hectares of wheat globally. If you divide run the back of the napkin math on that, you would produce 88 million tonne of nickel per year.
We don't need that scale, because the total global nickel production per year is around 3 million tonnes, meaning you would need "only" around 7.5 million hectares to yield that. However, nickel demand is expected to nearly double over the next 20 years, meaning we would need 15 million hectares, which is somewhere around the land footprint of oats and rye today, and half that of cotton, rapeseed, or sunflowers.
For example, the Salton Sea contains enough lithium dissolved in brines underground to provide lithium to transition 100% of the USA car and truck fleet to electric (18 million metric tons of lithium carbonate = 375 million car batteries).
And they are able to tap this "unconventional resource" in a way that doesn't require the massive pools of evaporating waters like in the Atacama desert using a technology called "direct lithium extraction (DLE).". And guess what, they can all so it while generated geothermal heat :) That is a better process, that has positive co-products.
There is no shortage of lithium... and rare earths aren't rare, just dirty to process. Copper and graphite are the few transition resources that might be in a shortage, but when prices go up, so too does innovation, and we are seeing that with the production of synthetic graphite.
With nickel, the current global production is 3 million tonnes per annum (MTPA). Our minerals are 0.333% nickel, which is well below that ~1.3% that is normally required to make economic sense to extract from. Our mineral source has never been used for nickel to date (making it unconventional).
For our olivine minerals around 1 tonne has to be weathered to remove 1 tonne of carbon dioxide, which liberates produces 0.333% tonnes of nickel. We need to weather 300 tonnes of olivine for 1 tonne of nickel.
The proposed deep sea nodules in the article only have 1% nickel so you need 100 tonnes of them brought to the surface and then refined to get the nickel. For us the plants essentially do the major refining up from the 0.333% to 1%-2.5%, and are then processed to a bi-ore that is 15%-30% nickel, some of the richest nickel ore on the planet.
Carbon dioxide removal needs to be at gigatonne scale, so in pursuit of carbon removal, if we were weathering 1 gigatonne of olivine per year, we would produce 3 megatonnes of nickel as a "by-product." This means we would match the total global production today, while doing carbon removal our main objective...
And we have secured multiple gigatonnes of olivine already, and are not limited by this or land use. Humanity currently mines 30-50 billion tonnes of sand today and farms on the order of billions of hectares of acres, though for us today, we are focused on using natural serpentine soils.
Is that helpful for you?
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/us-department-energy-an... https://blogs.gwu.edu/wagnerm/welcome/research/graphite_synt... https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/SAND/ygd... https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/
Full disclosure, I have been working for the last two years developing this technology, but combining enhanced weathering of olivine for carbon dioxide removal, with nickel phytomining in order to solve two problems at once. Leaving stealth finally after two years, look out next week for an announcement... Will post here.
"Extrapolation to Loss of IQ points, compared to uninfected controls:
Mild Covid, Resolved Symptoms: 3 points
Unresolved Symptoms: 6 points
Covid requiring Intensive Care Unit admission: 9 point
Reinfection: Additional 2 points "
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-covid-and-cognitive-de... https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2311330 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2311200
The virus is a massive vascular infection attacking every cell on the lining of the body (blood vessels, endothelial cells) and even organ organs, heart damage etc... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8771611/
Often times I'm CC'd on an email thread and can't always know what is going on just from previews, so an AI summary as the headlines would be very helpful to be able to know what is going on, without having to go into my inbox...
Real smart drugs = nootropics = piracetam and piracetam-like molecules. Stimulants generally decrease performance, increase false positives, and lead to worse performance as this study showed (especially in a first time user).
Most nootropics take about 14 days to hit their stride and the effect isn't discernible immediately (though can be detected in an EEG)...
See study: "Increase in the power of human memory in normal man through the use of drugs"
"Nootropyl (Piracetam) a drug reported to facilitate learning in animals was tested for its effect on man by administering it to normal volunteers. The subjects were given 3x4 capsules at 400 mg per day, in a double blind study. Each subject learned series of words presented as stimuli upon a memory drum. No effects were observed after 7 days but after 14 days verbal learning had significantly increased."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/826948/
Study: "Single-dose piracetam effects on global complexity measures of human spontaneous multichannel EEG"
"The results indicate that a single dose of piracetam dose-dependently affects the spontaneous EEG in normal volunteers, showing effects at the lowest treatment level. The decreased EEG complexity is interpreted as increased cooperativity of brain functional processes."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10555876/
Study: "Single doses of piracetam affect 42-channel event-related potential microstate maps in a cognitive paradigm"
"U-shaped dose-dependent effects were found; they were strongest after 4.8 g piracetam. Since these particular ERP segments are recognized to be strongly correlated to cognitive functions, the present findings suggest that single medium doses of piracetam selectively activate differently located or oriented neurons during cognitive steps of information processing."
See their website here: https://www.sibelco.com/en/150-years/aheim
"The proximity of Aheim’s mine, processing facility and shipping terminal enables Sibelco to run a highly efficient operation with minimal transport or double-handling of materials. Quarried olivine is moved via conveyor belt through a 4km tunnel to the processing plant where it is crushed, dried and screened into different grades."
When transporting mostly by ship, olivine ERW efficiency can remain >90% even with 1000+ kilometers of sea transit.
See this working paper: Environmental life cycle assessment of CO2 sequestration through enhanced weathering of olivine https://legacy.projectvesta.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/E...
In fact, terrestrial enhanced rock weathering (ERW) was created to replace the cost of liming fields for farmers, which leads to the release of carbon. Many farmers are open to it because they need to balance their soil's ph. Which as you said, is important to farmers because the land "is the tool the farmers use to make their living" therefore, you can consider ERW/liming as the maintianence on their tool...
Rolling stones; fast weathering of olivine in shallow seas for cost-effective CO2 capture and mitigation of global warming and ocean acidification https://esd.copernicus.org/preprints/2/551/2011/esdd-2-551-2...
"A life cycle assessment (LCA) about the potential of basaltic rocks for enhanced weathering and soil carbonation (Section 5.1.) found transportation (related to the distance between the quarry and the place of application) as the major process negatively affecting CO2 sequestration, whereas grinding had less effects on the CO2 budget, which could however be related to the relative coarseness (<5 mm) of the particles."
A lot of companies doing this use fines or waste material, but it can still be done efficiently.
One thing you seem to be missing coming from the copper world is that the ore for copper is very low percentage of copper and has a maybe 3:1 stripping ratio, so you need to mine and grind and use 300-400 tonnes to get 1 tonne of copper out.
With ultramafic and mafic rocks, you can have huge continuous bodies of these minerals, with very high usage and efficient ratio. One tonne of olivine removes more than 1 tonne of resultant carbon based on its Mg cation content.
Transport is electrifying and so is the grid that powers those vehicles, therefore in the long run you can assume these will become more and more efficient.
Potential and costs of carbon dioxide removal by enhanced weathering of rocks https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa9c4
Environmental life cycle assessment of CO2 sequestration through enhanced weathering of olivine https://legacy.projectvesta.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/E...
See Potential and costs of carbon dioxide removal by enhanced weathering of rocks https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa9c4
Environmental life cycle assessment of CO2 sequestration through enhanced weathering of olivine https://legacy.projectvesta.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/E...
Enhanced Weathering: An Effective and Cheap Tool to Sequester Co2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-005-3485-y
See: The role of soils in the regulation of ocean acidification - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.202...
I use Reddit Comment Companion on Reddit and it saves me from opening so many tabs... it would be great to have here...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-comment-com...
Also, I love the secret, extra brightness levels it allows on the main screen, especially when I am outside. Do you know if there is any risk of damage to the brightness by using it at the higher settings?
I once had software that me increase the volume of my macbook speakers and one day I was working and vibing to the song and pushed the volume all the way up... and blew a speaker out...
The Amazon is already close to the tipping point of becoming a savanna and net carbon emitting system.
Think this doesn't matter to people in the US? Well, turns out the rain in the Midwest of the United States comes from the Amazon rainforest. The planet is intricately intertwined and we do not truly understand the forces we are messing with...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18728-7 https://www.economist.com/interactive/graphic-detail/2022/05... https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-deforestation-affecting-g...
There is a lot of lithium out there, but other minerals/metals will likely be limiting factors and the metals used in batteries will be determined by price availability. For example, nickel is better than cobalt from an energy density and weight perspective, but there needs to be a 19X increase in nickel mining to have enough for EV+stainless steel use and most of the easy nickel has already been mined. There are plenty of rare earth minerals out there, but they are extremely dirty to produce, and so very few places produce them.
Even with mining though, EVs are more efficient for the one time mining of the metals, vs the constant life time use of "mining" of fossil fuels to power ICE engines. Also, the recycling aspect is pretty positive too. Once enough metals are mined for all cars to transitions, we should be able to survive mostly off of recycling, with smaller amounts freshly mined.
That is why Elon is out there asking mining companies to "please mine more nickel," because he knows about the looming shortages. That is why they are using iron cathodes in Model 3 and stationary storage. See the article, "All the mines Tesla needs to build 20 million cars a year" [2].
An example of recycling is with aluminum, where b/c of prolific recycling, we only have to mine 10% or so each year's needs to keep up with demand. We need to figure out how to sustainably extract the needed quantities of these important minerals this century, which can then power humanity's needs almost indefinitely. This is one of the great challenges of this century.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in... [2] https://www.mining.com/all-the-mines-tesla-needs-to-build-20...
I'm glad to see this iteration, as it looks like it is getting closer and closer to reality. He is definitely on the cutting edge of these things in terms of usability.