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.