Carbon Removal Newsroom

Last month, the non-profit Carbon Drawdown Initiative published a blog post featuring pictures of 11 projects across the world where researchers were spreading basaltic rock dust onto farm fields. This technique is known as enhanced weathering, and the post shows an upward trend in popularity. According to the post, the projects photographed cumulatively spread 50,000 tons of rock dust onto farm fields last year, with another 500,000 planned for this year. These pilot programs are conducted by a growing number of organizations that believe vast amounts of co2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere by applying basaltic rock dust to working croplands while also improving agricultural yields. If that’s true, it will represent an affordable carbon removal method with significant co-benefits. But how can scientists tell that co2 drawdown occurs after the rock dust is applied to the fields? What techniques and experiments will confirm that this process is ready to be scaled up? On this episode the science panel loo