Our pilot project with 1217 tons of basalt demonstrates the full value chain for ERW at € 230 per ton of CO₂ (with € 100-150 in sight)

Why do different ERW measurement approaches seem (?) to measure different amounts of CDR?

A guest-blog-post by Dr. Ingrid Smet introducing her detailed report on all the do’s & don’ts, lightbulb & head scratch moments, behind-the-scenes information & preliminary conclusions from the first year of spreading 6 different olivine rich rock dusts (a total of 4500 kg) to a 2 hectare cotton field in Thessaly/Greece.

We will set up an extensive greenhouse experiment, our goal is to conduct experiments such that we can sample for all known ERW analytical approaches.

Our new cheat sheet makes it possible to design early ERW pilot-projects today even without having those glitzy models of the future and before all those field tests have been done. Let’s start scaling now!

While digging deeper into ERW every few months we encounter yet another rabbit hole moment when we come across another important parameter that influences the weathering activity and that needs attention.

How could spreading 40 t/ha work from a practical perspective? At Project Carbdown we have undertaken a few practical experiments over the last 2 years which we want to document in this blog post.

Measuring the weathering rates of basalt in “open nature” is very hard to do. To properly assess the weathering rates we need to measure this “in the field” as lab experiments are expected to show lower weathering rates which causes us to underestimate the carbon removal rates. Here is a short overview.

Based on the results from last year’s enhanced weathering experiments on our field in Fürth we decided to build a new, improved experiment in 2022: The XXL Lysimeter Project. For this experiment we had to engineer and build 20 large lysimeters and put them into the field. This is a photo logbook of this process.

In this document I’d like to explore from my -- of course limited -- perspective what this could mean for climate startups, especially with regard to the urgent scale up of climate solutions for CDR (carbon dioxide reduction) which simply can’t be delayed.

What you see here is a pile of 29 tons of basalt dust, one truckload. Over the next few years this basalt will suck 9 tons of CO2 from the ambient air when the dust is simply spread on half a hectare or one hectare of cropland. With this pile one average citizen of Germany is becoming climate neutral.

In this short paper we would like to explain why the ultimate goal of our involvement with Project Carbdown is to develop cheap, electronic sensors for measuring the weathering of rock dusts in croplands.

We recently published a long blog post with our learnings of the first year. These learnings lead to an additional, updated experiment that we will set up in early 2022, the Carbdown XXL Lysimeter Project!

Project Carbdown, our science project aimed at measuring the CO₂ sequestration by enhanced weathering with rock dust on croplands, has been going on for a year now. It is time to look at the results of the first year, draw some conclusions and adapt the ongoing experiments accordingly.

After a short introduction this article summarizes our learnings and conclusions. These will lead to some changes to our ongoing experiments and have also triggered the development of a new, additional experiment, the “Carbdown XXL-Lysimeter Experiment” that we will announce in a few days.

“Enhanced Weathering: What you need to know.” Youtuber Patrick Niedermayer has created a new explainer video about enhanced weathering!

Paessler AG has published a nice video and case-study on how we use their PRTG software to monitor soil and environmental parameters in our enhanced weathering experiments with basalt and olivine in several locations in Europe.

Six months ago we started working for Project Carbdown on our fields in Larissa (Greece) as well as in Fürth and in Bramstedt (Germany). This blog is our photo album of what happened since then.

Youtuber Patrick Niedermayer has created a great explainer video about enhanced weathering with basalt and about Project Carbdown.

Kurzbeschreibung Project Carbdown: Klimaschutz mit negativen Emissionen durch beschleunigte Verwitterung