Foresight Institute is Accelerating High Risk High Rewards Projects to Heal the Planet
In this 4-week accelerator, accepted teams competed with a scientific or technological proposal that, if implemented, would solve a crucial aspect of our planet's climate and ecosystem challenges.
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 5, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The winning projects will receive financial support and ongoing guidance from Foresight Institute.
Foresight Institute congratulates all teams who participated in the accelerator program and the pioneering winning projects:
1st Place: Project Vesta: Olivine-Accelerated Coastal Enhanced Weathering
2nd Place: SystemicAgri: Improving Ag to Avoid Excess Carbon
3rd Place: CT Fusion: High Energy Fusion Energy Proof of Concept
Large-scale Passive Carbon Sequestration via Engineered Porous Materials
Watch all accelerator videos and projects presentations, read more on the participating project, their next steps, and the teams leading them at https://foresight.org/2020-healing-the-planet-accelerator/
1ST PLACE: PROJECT VESTA - OLIVINE ACCELERATED COASTAL ENHANCED WEATHERING
Project Vesta's plan to make radical progress to heal the planet is to further the science of enhanced weathering and galvanize global deployment of green sand beaches.
The non-profit organization exists to prove the science of Coastal Enhanced Weathering (CEW) in an ocean environment, in order to develop CEW as a mature solution for climate change, opening the way for deployment to be scaled for large-scale carbon removal.
Once scaled, Project Vesta plans to remove gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year, in a permanent, safe, and cost-effective way. The process captures 20 times more carbon dioxide than the extraction and transportation of the olivine. If deployed on just 2% of global shelf seas, CEW could capture 100% of annual human emissions.
As next steps, Project Vesta is beginning their first pilot experiments, with the team arriving onsite this month, and continuing fundraising in order to resource the work being done through beach experiments.
More about Project Vesta: http://www.projectvesta.org
2ND PLACE: SYSTEMIC AGRI - IMPROVING AGRICULTURE TO AVOID EXCESS CARBON
The farmers often come across with various possible solutions to optimize farming, though, those solutions often might be either high-priced, lacking regional socio-eco-economic specifications or revenue management. Farm Foresight App, SystemicAgri, delivers affordable and sustainable development strategies for desired time frames to small farmers using the visualization of scenarios and impact assessment.
After filling general farm characteristics and investment expectations, SystemicAgri provides understandable infographics, reports and maps of systemic solutions for ecological regeneration in agricultural landscapes. At least three scenarios are provided, where regionally based good farming practices, return on investment, current and upcoming land use policies and network opportunities among consumers, authorities and producers are included. Ultimately, SystemicAgri empowers generations of farmers both economically and socially and creates better futures.
Validating and building the SystemicAgri App will be our next steps, meaning that we are open to welcome new team members and accept suitable funding.
3RD PLACE: CT FUSION - HIGH ENERGY FUSION ENERGY PROOF OF CONCEPT
Fusion is a commercial fusion energy company based in Seattle, WA. It seeks to make fusion energy affordable and fully commercially viable by 2031. Fusion is the process that powers stars. It can provide highly power dense, firm, carbon free electricity or industrial process heat with zero risk of meltdowns, no long-lived waste and only minimal land requirements.
To equitably deliver these benefits around the world, CTFusion seeks a broad coalition of investors and supporters from energy and engineering companies, philanthropists, non-profits, and environmental organizations. It is fundraising for its next four year project, a proof of concept machine that will demonstrate the physics necessary for a later net electric pilot plant.
LARGE-SCALE PASSIVE CARBON SEQUESTRATION VIA ENGINEERED POROUS MATERIALS
We are working on developing a novel porous material to capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere (called direct air capture, or DAC). To return the atmosphere to 350 ppm CO2, we need to remove about 1100 Gt (gigatonnes) CO2 from the atmosphere–more if the world doesn't very aggressively attempt to eliminate all fossil fuel emissions. The size of the new DAC industry required to accomplish this much CO2 removal will need to be the cumulative scope of the entire petrochemical industry for the last 30 years. By developing materials specifically to optimize DAC, we are hoping to make this enormous undertaking as feasible as possible.
Our next step is to computationally analyze the broadest possible range of materials and processes in a search for improved materials.
Media Contact
Steve Burgess, Foresight Institute, +1 805-895-9064, [email protected]
SOURCE Foresight Institute
Share this article