Topic
Accelerating the natural dissolution of silicate minerals such as olivine and enstatite to capture carbon, including on crushed mine tailings.
Enhanced rock weathering's problem has always been rate rather than chemistry, and a Nature Biotechnology result attacks the rate directly. The 2.6-fold gain was measured on kilograms of mineral in a flow reactor.
Reality
A pilot bioreactor running on unprocessed seawater and acetate pulled 0.50 grams of CO2 a day out of the air from 4 kilograms of rock, a modest number obtained by direct measurement in a tank rather than by inference from a field plot.
Reality
The 2.6-fold speedup came from deleting the microbe's own off switch. That leaves the hard part of this work to whoever writes the discharge permit for a basin full of it.
Reality
Cornell's Louis Derry puts export from natural basaltic landscapes at 0.22 to 1 tonne of CO2 per hectare a year. The removal math sold to credit buyers starts 30 centimetres up.
Reality
A modified Gluconobacter oxydans releases nickel and cobalt from ultramafic rock while parking carbon in magnesium oxalate, which holds two carbons per magnesium. It is still flask-scale work.
Reality