I currently run Metalplant, where we use hyperaccumulator plants to mine soil for nickel, while removing carbon dioxide through enhanced rock weathering.
Enhanced weathering works by crushing magnesium-silicate minerals and spreading them into fields to generate alkalinity that forces CO2 to become stored as bicarbonate for 10,000+ years. Olivine is one of the most efficient minerals at this process, but contains trace nickel ~0.3%.
Nickel hyperaccumulator plants grow natively in nickel-bearing soils and draw nickel up from the soil and store it in their biomass as a natural defense against predators. The plants are harvested and processed to pure nickel products. With optimized plants, hundreds of kilograms of nickel can be recovered per hectare per year.
Normally phytomining is as phytoremediation and the soil nickel level depletes, but by utilizing olivine weathering on these soils already containing nickel, we can resupply the nickel as the olivine weathers, stoichemetrically removing gross 300 tonnes of carbon for every tonne of nickel we replenish into the field.
The company was originally developed as a way to demonstrate how to create an economically viable carbon removal technology that creates valuable and important co-products that can drive the upscaling of the process.
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In 2017, I started Climigitation a non-profit think tank dedicated to promoting technologies and techniques to mitigate climate change and remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. Started as a non-profit, it was known as Project Vesta and the idea was to use tropical beaches to speed up Earth's natural long-term carbon-silicate cycle. In early 2021, I left Project Vesta after that, it was split into a non-profit and a for-profit PBC. Vesta has successfully deployed olivine onto beaches in Southhampton New York, and Duck, North Carolina and now focuses on beach nourishment.
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In the biohacking space, I was a "nootropics historian" and started and ran the nootropics company, Nootroo. I helped drive the adoption and acceptance of nootropics and in some ways biohacking in general. You can read a profile of me that is a snapshot from that time of my life in The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/the-brain-bro/497546/ And this is one of the last interviews I did on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwYfsknlWHI You can also find interviews from that time in GQ, Men's Health, ABC Nightline News, NPR, The Guardian, among others. You can see the most accurate definition of nootropics at https://Nootroo.com
MeditationBattleLeague.com - "head-to-head" competitive meditation with EEG headsets.
*This is a personal account and posts here are opinions and do not represent the views of my company/orgs unless otherwise stated.*