December 13, 2023

Photo credit – Lithos Carbon

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, McKinsey and the many businesses using Stripe Climate, Frontier Climate is an advanced market commitment to buy an upfront $1 billion-plus in permanent carbon removal between 2022-2030. 

Toward this goal, it has recently been announced that Frontier has facilitated its first set of enhanced weathering offtake agreements with Lithos Carbon, a San Francisco-based carbon removal company taking a unique approach to generating carbon credits by turning farms into carbon capture centers with the goal of removing 1 billion tons of atmospheric CO2 this decade while also improving crop yields. How, you ask? By using inexpensive volcanic basalt to capture and permanently lock away atmospheric carbon. 

Enhanced weathering refers to a variety of approaches to accelerate the natural absorption and storage of carbon in alkaline rocks that when exposed to rain, wind, or seawater, slowly break down, or “weather”.  Throughout the process the rocks absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into bicarbonate, which eventually makes its way to the ocean through groundwater for permanent storage.

Normally, this process would take hundreds, or even thousands of years. But by grinding up alkaline rocks like basalt or olivine to increase their surface area, and spreading them on fields to increase their exposure to ambient CO2, the process can be achieved in just a few years.

These enhanced weathering approaches have the potential to account for 2-4 gigatons of carbon removal per year by 2050.

Co-founded in March 2022 by Mary Yap, Dr. Noah Planavsky, and Dr. Chris Reinhard, Lithos replaces traditional agricultural lime by spreading crushed volcanic basalt dust on cropland. Once it rains, a chemical reaction occurs with the rainwater and the CO2 in the air, resulting in dissolved bicarbonate which releases crop-benefitting nutrients into the soil in the process.

Based on decades of academic research, Lithos found that compared to rival carbon capture solutions, theirs is:

More cost efficient and scalable – costing five times less than direct air capture solutions. 

Faster – Lithos’ model significantly accelerates the natural process of rock weathering, achieving in two-to-three seasons what would take 15-50 years in other rock weathering deployments, and up to 1,000 times faster than in nature. 

More effective – Lithos’ platform permanently locks away CO2 with storage lifetimes exceeding 100,000 years. 

Designed for row crop farmers, Lithos’ easy-to-set-up software fine-tunes deployment on a field-by-field and crop-by-crop basis to guard against any negative impacts and maximize crop yields. The platform generates a custom application that considers variables in soil chemistry, crop nutrition, climatology, particle distribution, and other conditions.

Once spread, Lithos chemically measures carbon removal volume using a novel technique invented at Yale University that combines soil samples with high-precision elemental measurements and sells credits to corporations with a share of the proceeds going directly back to the farmer.

“Lithos has a path to delivering meaningful amounts of carbon removal at reasonable prices within the next few years,” said Nan Ransohoff, head of Frontier. “They’re charting a path for what responsible scale-up looks like for a pathway that’s likely to be a sizable part of the global carbon removal portfolio.”

In early November 2022, this simple approach gained the attention of Union Square Ventures and Greylock Partners, which led a $6.3 million Seed round for the company that also saw participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Carbon Removal Partners, Fall Line Capital, the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, and Cavallo Ventures – representing the first ever climate investment made by both Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. 

Frontier buyers were Lithos’ first customers through a pre-purchase in the Spring of 2022, and now, under the terms of this new agreement, Frontier buyers will pay Lithos $57.1 million to permanently remove 154,240 tons of CO2 between 2024-2028. More than half of this tonnage is expected to be delivered by the end of 2025 – a volume that is magnitudes more than has been achieved so far via all pathways on a global scale. 

The scale of this offtake will generate vast amounts of field data across diverse soil types and climate conditions. Lithos stated that this data will then be shared with scientists and academics to create greater transparency, collaboration, and the development of more accurate geochemical models – in addition to improving our understanding of just what enhanced weathering is and how it works. 

Although there is a scientific consensus that enhanced weathering results in permanent CO2 removal, the implementation has been hindered by the difficulty in measuring its impact. Traditionally, most projects have relied on modeling to estimate carbon dioxide removal, but Lithos monitors the change in the soil’s geochemical profile as a proxy for how much CO2 is removed, providing an accurate method with fewer hardware needs, and enabling Lithos to sample at high frequencies without growing costs. 

“This offtake accelerates our deployment by 3–4 years, allowing us to push the limits of our established supply chain and accelerate scientific understanding across diverse soils and climates,” said Mary Yap, found and CEO, Lithos. “By publicly sharing this data, we hope to help enhanced weathering scale safely and responsibly.”

“By learning faster, we unlock a step-function reduction in cost, and compounding benefits for agricultural communities. We’re thrilled to have Frontier’s support in scaling transparent and scientifically rigorous removal—this agreement will help pave the way for billion-ton carbon removal.”

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Unconventional Ag. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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