Hi HN, I am Eric Matzner, the Co-Founder of Project Vesta and I have been responding to all of the questions on this thread and will continue to answer them, but I just wanted to say thank you for all of the interest. When YC posted their Carbon Removal Technologies Requests for Startups page[1] about 8 months ago, I responded to a comment on the post where @btilly[2] mentioned one of the research papers that our project is based on.[3] We were in stealth mode back then, as I was still putting the project together, but the positive response there helped energize and inform our operations, so thank all of you for that as well. I do not personally know the person who posted this today either, but thank you for posting it (although we were not prepared for this amount of inbound interest today). Please note that we will get back to everyone who submitted our "Get Involved" form over the next couple of days. Thank you to all who donated as well for your support, the HN community has been very generous and we appreciate your enthusiasm and support for the project.

I can also give you a project update that we have not announced anywhere else as of yet. After our launch on Earth Day in April, we received an individual contribution/grant that has given us enough funding to take significant steps forward towards getting our pilot project on a beach. It has greatly accelerated our progress and we are now moving more rapidly to make this a reality. We are engaged with the Dutch independent institute for applied research in water and the subsurface, Deltares[4], to help us design the pilot project experiment.

Project Vesta is a non-profit, globally decentralized entity and we are looking for additional partner universities, groups, and others to team up with. We are looking for input on our experimental design from researchers, engineers, and experts in the fields related to this project (such as geochemistry and the marine sciences). The design of the experiment is crucial and has to be rigorous in terms of calculating the accelerated weathering rate of olivine in the open system of a beach and in terms of demonstrating marine safety so that the results will be accepted as definitive by the scientific community and the public.

Our greatest fear right now is that we will spend a year running a study and then when the results come back, the data will not be accepted for one reason or another and we are asked to go back to get more data. We and the planet frankly do not have the time to wait another year, so we want to make sure we do it right the first time around and have the right stakeholders involved before it is deployed. To make sure it is done properly, we want to run the experimental design by as many relevant parties as possible so that when the data comes back we have an accepted consensus that is irrefutable in terms of the weathering rate and safety data, so we can move forward with deployment.

If you want to join our scientific advisory board or just help give input on our experimental design, please reach out on our Get Involved [5] page -> https://projectvesta.org/get-involved/

We are also looking for additional donors/family offices/etc and partners who want to sidestep the climate change debate and move forward on taking direct action to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While we are proponents of cutting emissions and agree it needs to be done, we want to get started removing as much CO2 from the atmosphere as we can until we are back down to Pre-Industrial CO2 levels. We believe that by making extremely effective, permanent, and cheap CO2 removal available, we can dramatically change the conversation and force action. Please reach out if you would like to help.

Thank you,

Eric

p.s. If you want to learn a bit more about the process and our organization, check out this interview with me on the Nori podcast [6] -> https://nori.com/podcasts/carbon-removal-newsroom/project-ve...

We are just launching our social profiles, but feel free to follow us for updates:
Twitter -> https://twitter.com/Project_Vesta
Instagram -> https://instagram.com/projectvesta
FB page -> https://www.facebook.com/ProjectVestaCO2Removal/

[1] http://carbon.ycombinator.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18285606
[3] https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_77/1/
[4] https://www.deltares.nl/en/
[5] https://projectvesta.org/get-involved/
[6] https://nori.com/podcasts/carbon-removal-newsroom/project-ve...