Can adding minerals to ocean curb climate change? Elon Musk backs UM grad’s research
MIAMI -- Laura Stieghorst was sitting in the back of a University of Miami classroom in November 2021 when she got the email that would change her life.
As her professor lectured the class on sustainable development, Stieghorst, then a senior studying environmental science and policy, learned that Elon Musk — founder of Tesla and SpaceX, new owner of Twitter and the world’s richest man — was about to give her a $100,000 grant to fund her research proposal to fight climate change.
“I just wanted to jump out of my seat,” said Stieghorst, who graduated from UM in December.
She had applied for the money as part of the XPRIZE for Carbon Removal, a Musk-backed competition that promised to give 23 student-led research teams $100,000 grants to study ways to slow climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
When she submitted her proposal a month earlier, Stieghorst didn’t expect to win. Now, as she stared at her laptop screen, it dawned on her that this money was about to launch her career. “It was wonderful, and it was also scary,” Stieghorst said, “because it was like, ‘Oh man, now I really have to do this. It’s not just a proposal anymore–this will be my job now.’”
The grant helped Stieghorst found Básico, a startup specializing in carbon removal, and fund a research collaboration with UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.
Básico aims to use the world’s oceans to soak up carbon through a pioneering but unproven concept called ocean alkalinity enhancement, which involves pouring mineral dusts from ships at sea. If Stieghorst’s ambitious approach succeeds, she could help create a new marine-based market where businesses and industries pay to remove carbon from the atmosphere to offset their carbon emissions.
Supercharging the ocean’s CO2 sponge
Scientists have been dreaming about fighting climate change through OAE since the 1990s.
“This idea has been kicking around for a long time,” said Chris Langdon, a UM marine biology professor who partnered with Stieghorst to study the technology at his Virginia Key lab. “I’ve been talking about it in lectures for years.”
But the technique also has been viewed as a long-shot, and it hasn’t attracted much funding through traditional research grants. Without the XPRIZE money, Langdon said he and the grad students who work in his lab wouldn’t have been able to study it. “Being able to actually buy supplies and equipment and pay a stipend to the students was all made possible by this funding.”
There is a reason why the technique is so intriguing. Oceans already are a sponge for carbon dioxide. They’ve absorbed about 30% of the CO2 human beings have pumped into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution, according to a 2019 paper from an international team of scientists led by NOAA. OAE is envisioned as a booster shot of sorts that would increase the amount of carbon the oceans can absorb.
In theory, OAE should work like this: As cargo and passenger ships crisscross the seas, they release a dusting of alkaline minerals in their wake. “Alkaline” is the opposite of “acidic.” So boosting ocean alkalinity could have two benefits. First, it could reverse ocean acidification, a man-made phenomenon that has hurt coral and other sea life. And second — according to the laws of chemistry — more alkaline water should be able to absorb more carbon dioxide and slow climate change.
But so far, it remains a theory. No one has tested OAE thoroughly enough to say just how much carbon the strategy could remove from the atmosphere and — another critical question — whether it would harm sea creatures. That’s where Básico comes in: The startup’s first mission is to calculate how much carbon the concept actually captures and to test its impact on coral.
To do that, Langdon and a team of student researchers spent three months adding alkaline minerals to coral tanks at a UM lab on Virginia Key this summer. The team measured the impact of the minerals on coral health, and then raised the temperature in the tanks to see if the minerals helped the corals stay healthier under heat stress.
Meanwhile, Langdon’s team added alkaline minerals to a 9,000-gallon wind and wave simulation tank to replicate how the minerals might behave in the ocean. Then, they measured how much extra carbon the seawater in the tank had absorbed.
The team hasn’t yet published its findings. But Riley Palmer, a master’s student in Langdon’s lab who ran the coral research, said the minerals “didn’t have any negative impact on the corals.”
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: