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> Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts out 15-20 tons of CO2/year. Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for o

> Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts out 15-20 tons of CO2/year. Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. Would mining operations be able to scale appropriately without prices going through the roof?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
More importantly, how much carbon does olivine mining burn per ton? Is this scheme still carbon-negative if we account for that (and transportation)?
- matznerd 8y ago
  Great question, the total CO2 expenditure of the whole olivine mining, milling, and transport process has been calculated to be 4% of the amount of CO2 that is captured. In general, the cost of mining, milling and grinding 1 ton of rock in large-scale mining, has been calculated to be about $7/ton. Applied to olivine, it proposed that it would be about $12/ton. The good news is that for the initial olivine, we will attempt to utilize "tailing" piles, which are the removed rock from existing mines. It turns out that diamonds, nickel, chromite, and other commodities are found in olivine-rich rocks. And to get to them, they have to dig up massive amounts of olivine that just sits on the site in piles as "waste." Those tailings piles are also where some of the real-world calculations for olivine dissolution rates come from. They even determined that some mines hosted in olivine-rich rocks actually more than offset their own CO2 emissions in this unintentional way. The ideal set up for a beach project would be right on the coast (in a tropical area as temperature affects the speed of weathering), near the end of a railway that runs from an abandoned mine with tons of tailings piles.
theothermkn 8y ago
> Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. I ask too much, I know, but first-semester freshman macroeconomic comments drive me nuts. As demand increases, and as production rises to meet it, the entire economics of the production chain changes. Purchases amortize more quickly. Processes improve. Infrastructure gets more fully utilized. The effects of mass production are felt all the way down the supply chain. I mean, as far as I know. I'm no economist. But anyone who implies that increased demand automatically means increased prices probably knows even less than me.
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  That might be why GP was asking a question rather than making an assertion.
- drankula3 8y ago
  And needlessly passive aggressive posts drive me nuts. Production will rise to meet supply, but that does not mean it will do so smoothly or easily. Perhaps accessible olivine is limited. Perhaps current extraction methods would be too expensive at scale. We just don't know.
  - aboodman 8y ago
    Of you watch the video on the landing page they describe that olivine is a very common by-product of mining for other stuff. Currently the practice is to just pile it up, as it's worthless. So you don't even need to mine it (at least until demand scales way up) - just go to nearest mine and pick it up.
    - ben_w 8y ago
      In much the same way, you can fuel a Diesel engine with a free waste product (used deep fat frying oil), which some people would even pay you to take away. Only thing is, once a significant number of people started doing that, it generally stopped being free — people started charging money for it.
- Proziam 8y ago
  If there's a limited overall supply it follows that increased demand will move the price upwards. If supply can easily scale to meet demand, then scaling effects take over and prices can come down. The economics of the situation are largely dependant on factors that few people have enough information to really assess (mining rates, total unmined supply, etc)
- jf- 8y ago
  Your post is utterly and needlessly condescending. Exactly what prompted you to respond to the other poster like that?
cbkeller 8y ago
Geologist here. Can't speak to the economics, but there's no shortage of mineable olivine, mostly in areas where mantle lithosphere that was formerly below oceanic or island arc crust has been "obducted" on the continental crust and thrust up to the surface (the mantle is mostly olivine). These are called ophiolites, and they're not uncommon in places where you used to have a destructive plate boundary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiolite
- ianai 8y ago
  Google says there’s 2.996×10^12 tons of carbon in the atmosphere. I’m guestimating we have about 1/3 of that which needs to be pulled out to correct for emissions to this point. Do we have access to that amount of olivine? Thank you so much for your comment! Edit-As to pricing, if olivine is a common byproduct of other activities and generally common in that sense then obtaining 1 ton of olivine is the cost to move it. Then they need to process and disburse it. That seems like a cheap process. Edit2-the non-cheap part of this seems the dispersal. How long will it take to disperse all that olivine?
  - ben_w 8y ago
    > I’m guestimating we have about 1/3 of that which needs to be pulled out to correct for emissions to this point. For the moment, that’s a slight overestimate; we’re a little over 400ppm, and pre-Industrial levels were about 300ppm, so we “only” need to remove 1/4 (and we don’t really need to go back all the way to preindustrial levels, it was about 325ppm in 1970)
    - ianai 8y ago
      With 20/ton of olivine it’s still around a 20 trillion dollar industry (just that cost alone)!
  - cbkeller 8y ago
    Yes! Just to pick one famous ophiolite, the peridotites of the Semail ophiolite in Oman are perhaps 300km * 50km * 5km from a quick look at some maps and cross sections [1], so 75000 km3 at 3300 kg/m3 comes out to about 2.5E17 kg or 2.5 E14 metric tons. So that's just one ophiolite and we've got a few orders of magnitude to spare. If for any reason ophiolites weren't enough, there's places at slow-spreading ridges where it's peridotite all the way from the ocean floor to the outer core, albeit expensive to mine. In short, we would run out of CO2 before we run out of olivine. [1] https://doi.org/10.1144/gsjgs.151.3.0555 https://doi.org/10.1144/gsjgs.151.3.0555
zeroname 8y ago
> Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. Would mining operations be able to scale appropriately without prices going through the roof? Prices wouldn't go through the roof, because the demand isn't there at higher prices. A significantly higher price would make other methods of sequestration attractive instead.
matznerd 8y ago
Hi, yes it does appear possible to not only increase the mining capacity, but that doing so will actually bring the price down to around $10-$12/ton. To do the total sequestration of anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2 release per year with olivine, it would require approx ~7km^3 of rock (23 gigatons or billion tons). This is compared to the ~10km^3 of oil equivalents we retrieve from the earth each year. And the ~20 gt of construction minerals mined each year. There are individual mines (for other types of materials) that have excavated volumes of greater than ~25 km^3. To bring the planets atmospheric CO2 concentrations back to pre-industrial levels would likely require around 30-50 new olivine mines globally. The good news though is that olivine is extremely common, making up 80% of the mantle. Almost every country has olivine/dunite deposits, and so countries with cheap labor and lack of other viable export commodities would be ideal places to open mines, which would also help create jobs for them (and ones that actually help the planet).

TeMPOraL 8y ago

More importantly, how much carbon does olivine mining burn per ton? Is this scheme still carbon-negative if we account for that (and transportation)?

matznerd 8y ago
Great question, the total CO2 expenditure of the whole olivine mining, milling, and transport process has been calculated to be 4% of the amount of CO2 that is captured. In general, the cost of mining, milling and grinding 1 ton of rock in large-scale mining, has been calculated to be about $7/ton. Applied to olivine, it proposed that it would be about $12/ton. The good news is that for the initial olivine, we will attempt to utilize "tailing" piles, which are the removed rock from existing mines. It turns out that diamonds, nickel, chromite, and other commodities are found in olivine-rich rocks. And to get to them, they have to dig up massive amounts of olivine that just sits on the site in piles as "waste." Those tailings piles are also where some of the real-world calculations for olivine dissolution rates come from. They even determined that some mines hosted in olivine-rich rocks actually more than offset their own CO2 emissions in this unintentional way. The ideal set up for a beach project would be right on the coast (in a tropical area as temperature affects the speed of weathering), near the end of a railway that runs from an abandoned mine with tons of tailings piles.

theothermkn 8y ago

> Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. I ask too much, I know, but first-semester freshman macroeconomic comments drive me nuts. As demand increases, and as production rises to meet it, the entire economics of the production chain changes. Purchases amortize more quickly. Processes improve. Infrastructure gets more fully utilized. The effects of mass production are felt all the way down the supply chain. I mean, as far as I know. I'm no economist. But anyone who implies that increased demand automatically means increased prices probably knows even less than me.

andrewflnr 8y ago
That might be why GP was asking a question rather than making an assertion.
drankula3 8y ago
And needlessly passive aggressive posts drive me nuts. Production will rise to meet supply, but that does not mean it will do so smoothly or easily. Perhaps accessible olivine is limited. Perhaps current extraction methods would be too expensive at scale. We just don't know.
- aboodman 8y ago
  Of you watch the video on the landing page they describe that olivine is a very common by-product of mining for other stuff. Currently the practice is to just pile it up, as it's worthless. So you don't even need to mine it (at least until demand scales way up) - just go to nearest mine and pick it up.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    In much the same way, you can fuel a Diesel engine with a free waste product (used deep fat frying oil), which some people would even pay you to take away. Only thing is, once a significant number of people started doing that, it generally stopped being free — people started charging money for it.
Proziam 8y ago
If there's a limited overall supply it follows that increased demand will move the price upwards. If supply can easily scale to meet demand, then scaling effects take over and prices can come down. The economics of the situation are largely dependant on factors that few people have enough information to really assess (mining rates, total unmined supply, etc)
jf- 8y ago
Your post is utterly and needlessly condescending. Exactly what prompted you to respond to the other poster like that?

cbkeller 8y ago

Geologist here. Can't speak to the economics, but there's no shortage of mineable olivine, mostly in areas where mantle lithosphere that was formerly below oceanic or island arc crust has been "obducted" on the continental crust and thrust up to the surface (the mantle is mostly olivine). These are called ophiolites, and they're not uncommon in places where you used to have a destructive plate boundary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiolite

ianai 8y ago
Google says there’s 2.996×10^12 tons of carbon in the atmosphere. I’m guestimating we have about 1/3 of that which needs to be pulled out to correct for emissions to this point. Do we have access to that amount of olivine? Thank you so much for your comment! Edit-As to pricing, if olivine is a common byproduct of other activities and generally common in that sense then obtaining 1 ton of olivine is the cost to move it. Then they need to process and disburse it. That seems like a cheap process. Edit2-the non-cheap part of this seems the dispersal. How long will it take to disperse all that olivine?
- ben_w 8y ago
  > I’m guestimating we have about 1/3 of that which needs to be pulled out to correct for emissions to this point. For the moment, that’s a slight overestimate; we’re a little over 400ppm, and pre-Industrial levels were about 300ppm, so we “only” need to remove 1/4 (and we don’t really need to go back all the way to preindustrial levels, it was about 325ppm in 1970)
  - ianai 8y ago
    With 20/ton of olivine it’s still around a 20 trillion dollar industry (just that cost alone)!
- cbkeller 8y ago
  Yes! Just to pick one famous ophiolite, the peridotites of the Semail ophiolite in Oman are perhaps 300km * 50km * 5km from a quick look at some maps and cross sections [1], so 75000 km3 at 3300 kg/m3 comes out to about 2.5E17 kg or 2.5 E14 metric tons. So that's just one ophiolite and we've got a few orders of magnitude to spare. If for any reason ophiolites weren't enough, there's places at slow-spreading ridges where it's peridotite all the way from the ocean floor to the outer core, albeit expensive to mine. In short, we would run out of CO2 before we run out of olivine. [1] https://doi.org/10.1144/gsjgs.151.3.0555 https://doi.org/10.1144/gsjgs.151.3.0555

zeroname 8y ago

> Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. Would mining operations be able to scale appropriately without prices going through the roof? Prices wouldn't go through the roof, because the demand isn't there at higher prices. A significantly higher price would make other methods of sequestration attractive instead.

matznerd 8y ago

Hi, yes it does appear possible to not only increase the mining capacity, but that doing so will actually bring the price down to around $10-$12/ton. To do the total sequestration of anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2 release per year with olivine, it would require approx ~7km^3 of rock (23 gigatons or billion tons). This is compared to the ~10km^3 of oil equivalents we retrieve from the earth each year. And the ~20 gt of construction minerals mined each year. There are individual mines (for other types of materials) that have excavated volumes of greater than ~25 km^3. To bring the planets atmospheric CO2 concentrations back to pre-industrial levels would likely require around 30-50 new olivine mines globally. The good news though is that olivine is extremely common, making up 80% of the mantle. Almost every country has olivine/dunite deposits, and so countries with cheap labor and lack of other viable export commodities would be ideal places to open mines, which would also help create jobs for them (and ones that actually help the planet).