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P2P Learning Session and Workshop

ENHANCED ROCK WEATHERING

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Caitlin McKee, Assistant Director of Research

Precision Development (PxD)

How Innovative Financing Mechanisms Can Support a Globally Inclusive

Carbon Dioxide Removal Industry

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Enhanced Rock Weathering

Mechanism: Finely ground rocks are applied to soils to drive chemical reactions which capture atmospheric carbon and convert it into stable dissolved forms.

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In the ERW process, finely ground rocks are applied to soils to drive the chemical weathering reactions which capture atmospheric carbon and convert it into stable dissolved forms, which can flow through groundwater into oceans and stay for thousands of years.
ERW is thus considered a permanent carbon removal strategy, unlike other land-based strategies like agroforestry or agronomic practices that sequester soil organic carbon, as ERW does not require continued implementation to ensure carbon drawdown.
ERW is a particularly attractive carbon drawdown strategy for equator and near-equator geographies where there are ideal soil pH, temperature, and moisture conditions for the technology - and our analysis shows it’s over 3x cheaper to operationalize in Global South vs Global North contexts.

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Enhanced Rock Weathering

Impact on Climate:

Per acre, 0-100 tons CO2 estimated efficacy of ERW
In aggregate, between 1.7 and 8.5 Gt of CO2 removed per year if deployed across all cropland in India, Africa, Latin America

Impact on Farmers: limited studies on crop yield effects; improvements to soil pH, nutrient retention, crop resistance to stress

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ERW scientific research is quite nascent, with current studies using a wide range of materials and application rates, different soil types, measurement techniques to estimate the impact of ERW on carbon capture.
Hence, wide range of estimates on the benefits, depending on the study in question.
The majority of existing studies are numerical models [based on the magnesium and calcium content of the materials added, assuming their complete dissolution through the chemical reactions in the weathering process].

Impact on Climate: The estimated efficacy of ERW per acre spans a wide range, from essentially no impact to more than 100 tons of carbon dioxide removed per acre. (PxD, 2023). On aggregate, Some estimates (Strefler et al., 2018; Kelland et al., 2020; Figure 2) indicate CO2 removal rates that could lead to between 1.7 and 8.5 Gt of CO2 removed per year if the technology is deployed across all cropland in India, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and Africa.

Impact on Farmers: Few experiments have tested the crop yield effects of high application rates, such as those required for ERW - this is part of our call to action today. Various studies have shown improvements to soil pH, and thus nutrient retention, positive short-term yield responses, as well as some theoretical and empirical evidence for improved crop resistance to stress, including metal toxicity and drought, from silica additions such as crushed basalt.

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Challenges to Catalyzing ERW Globally

Additional scientific research on ERW mechanisms and potential is needed, particularly in the Global South
MRV at the field level is a key barrier to implementing geographically diverse ERW projects
Developing industry standards for key operational decisions is required for deployment of high-integrity projects

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Source: CarbonPlan

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Problem Definition:

Private Market Constraints

Current financing through private deals in VCM results in market challenges:

Slow field learning
Investment skewed towards high-income countries
Investment limited by absence of common standards
Insufficient attention to broader public objectives

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Moving to our problem definition….one of the main challenges in catalyzing an ERW market is the way projects are currently financed. Investment in ERW is driven by the private sector through deals in voluntary carbon markets. Private sector firms, focused on recovering their investments and maintaining a competitive edge, are unlikely to invest sufficiently in the broader research and development necessary to implement ERW at scale in diverse geographies. Realizing the potential of ERW at scale requires addressing market inefficiencies and financing gaps.

Slow field learning: If firms are competing to get to market quickly to recover their investment, they will be less inclined to share their approaches and results as they go.

Investment skewed towards high-income countries: If firms are rewarded primarily for the speed of getting to market, this will generally more investment in high-income countries which are perceived to be a better environment for research, testing, measurement, and risk-taking.

Investment limited by absence of common standards: It is a public good to have an agreed way of describing and measuring carbon removals, yet one of the key ways that firms compete is by differentiating their ERW measurement approach. This includes operational decisions around rock type, grain size, and application rates as well as critical community considerations for ERW deployments.

Insufficient attention to broader public objectives: Public priorities may, include other goals and trade-offs than precisely attributing each tonne of carbon removed. For example, if the total amount of carbon removed is more important than precise attribution, then a portfolio approach might be more efficient. Public priorities include the impact on agricultural productivity and food security, and sustainable incomes for people in low-income countries.

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Solution Hypothesis:

Blended Outcomes Financing

Public benefits

Private benefits

A “diverse” market commitment could coordinate objectives from various outcome buyers/funders so public and private benefits from ERW implementation in the Global South are properly valued.

Climate mitigation
Improved sustainability of food systems
Scientific capacity building

Increased agricultural productivity
Income for local and indigenous communities from PES models

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And our solution hypothesis that we developed through engagements with range of stakeholder conversations and participation of our advisory group members. Essentially, without some sort of additional incentive, the level of private investment in ERW will be far lower than is merited by the benefits to society. We think it is essential to develop financing mechanisms to unlock the full potential of ERW for carbon dioxide removal as a public good.

ERW implementation has the potential to convey a variety of benefits, which are of interest to both climate and livelihood funders.
[A common definition of what those benefits are does not yet exist, which is a barrier to finance.]
[Pool resources to create a common benefit definition (carbon, agronomic co-benefits, PES, etc)]

We propose a “diverse” market commitment which helps coordinate objectives from various outcome buyers/funders so the significant public benefits (for climate, food systems, and scientific capacity building) and private benefits (in agricultural productivity, and income for local and indigenous communities) from ERW implementation in the Global South are properly valued. This idea builds on the well-established “Advanced Market Commitment” - which is a financing mechanism that creates market incentives for firms to invest in a needed, but underexplored, technology and to invest in making it widely available. Our approach blends resources from funders interested in achieving diverse goals, such as climate aims and poverty alleviation, can help incentivize distributionally equitable carbon dioxide removal investment. Many more details in our paper, include desirable characteristics of the financing mechanism and discussion of tradeoffs.

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Recommendations for ERW Stakeholders

Fill in research gaps about ERW’s impacts on farmers in the Global South - both agronomic and income.
Agronomic trials in multiple geographies and across multiple value chains
Field trials (farmer/developer-led) with a focus on farmer welfare
Establishing best practices in benefit-sharing/operational models for ERW projects in the Global South.

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Source: Picture courtesy of CAP-A

There’s a lot to be done on the innovative financing side, but in terms of our recommendations for ERW stakeholders - addressing some of the precurseurs essential for developing those financing mechanisms.

Fill in research gaps about ERW’s impacts on farmers in the Global South - both agronomic and income (e.g. cost savings on fertilizer).

Agronomic trials in multiple geographies and across multiple value chain
Field trials (farmer/developer-led) with a focus on farmer welfare
Flux’s recent study in Kenya is a great step in addressing the Global South Research gap, especially given their openness in sharing learnings with the wider community

Establishing best practices in benefit-sharing/operational models for ERW projects in the Global South. This would include things like cost sharing i.e. who pays for the rock.

Conclusion: we remain excited by ERW’s potential for carbon removal and for smallholder farmers to benefit. There are lots of research and financing gaps to fill, but looking forward to today’s discussion and learning from others’ work.

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Mati Carbon�Smallholder farmer Climate Resilience through Carbon Removal

Shantanu Agarwal

Founder and CEO

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Status Update

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Mati Carbon is the first group to push Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) to an industrial scale in India. We use silicate rock dust for our ERW deployments with smallholder farmers in India.

Mati’s initial Indian deployments were the first ever engineered carbon dioxide removal credits to be delivered.

We have worked with 8000+ farmers across a total of 6000+ acres of farmland. We are scaling in India already with a established MRV and currently running trials in Zambia and Tanzania.

We focus on smallholder farmers with typical farm size of ~3 acres and have cracked dealing with small parcels of farms and with non-sophisticated farmers. We have built smallholder farmer specific MRV stack.

We finance our work with grants, debt, and customer advances.

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Learnings & Initiatives

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We have become proficient in dealing with smallholder farmer ERW with our proprietary MRV and tech stack.

We are continuously learning on how best to replicate our MRV stack to other regions to ensure ERW reaches its full potential at the right cost structure.

As we learn and grow, we aim to reduce the cost of credits and reach an increasing number of smallholder farmers across the Global South so that they can participate in the benefits and become more climate resilient.

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Challenges to scale ERW

Farmer perception and acceptance

As we carry our projects with smallholder farmers, introducing these new materials to their fields require a significant amount of social trust with farmers as it adds a risk to their livelihoods.

We manage this by partnering with established and reputed local farmer organisations and cooperatives to create more awareness around ERW and its co-benefits to the farmers.

Market acceptance of ERW MRV is still in infancy

Customers are not educated enough on ERW and do not treat it in the same way as DAC. Additionally, open system MRV is not trusted in a similar way.

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Collaborations and Partnerships

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How to best tackle the challenges – both operational and of perception of ERW while working with smallholder farmers in India and Africa

How to build the processes and technologies around MRV with SHFs

Happy to share our experiences on:

How we can best collaborate to ensure ERW reaches its full potential of benefits for smallholder farmers globally

Looking for ideas on

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“Enhanced Rock Weathering for Sustainable Carbon Farming”

Project by

Heliopolis University & Sekem for Land Reclamation

Wiekert Visser

Thoraya Seada, Hamed Hosny, Tarek Ragab, Sameh Shaddad

Supported by

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Location HU/SRL Living labs

Siwa

Bahariya

Alexandria

250 m

- 70 m

350 m

- 20 m

- 40 m

L i b y a

Egypt: W e s t e r n D e s e r t

Qatara

140 m

Enhanced Rock Weathering Project, Egypt

Key Objectives

Assess CDR effectiveness by basalt amendment in agriculture: 12 parallel tests over 3 years
Assess fertiliser benefits on crops from basalt mixed into compost amendments
Assess role of microbiome in CDR through ERW
Contribute to “Carbon Credit” development for sequestration through ERW

Supported by

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Heliopolis University “El Wahat” test site

Research base

Barren sand soil at project start, 0% SOC, Microbial count ~0

Aeolian sand, ~87% Quartz, ~13% calcite, no clay minerals

Soil amendments: Compost 47 t/ha/season, with basalt “flour” mixed-in, 0, 5, 27 wt%

Basalt soil conc: 0; 0,1; 0,9 wt% (application of 0; 2,4; 18 t/ha/season)

12 test-plots, ~1 acre each, plus blanks

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Test location

Test fields design

Irrigation by Central Pivot, ~3 mm/d

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The process

Total deployed so far: ~150 ton basalt (4 seasons)

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MRV: data collection & analyses methods

Sampling protocol:

1) Immediately after basalt/compost amendment application and disking, just before planting/sowing.
2) Midway growing season and 3) end of growing season
2 “spot” auger; 1 comingled samples/plot (created from ~10 subsamples each): 2 sets (soil chemistry and microbiology). Depth 0-20 cm plus some 20-40 cm. So-far ~450 samples
Continuous soil monitoring by in-soil sensors (T, pH, EC, Moisture, K, P, N); 12 stations

Analyses

Plant morphology over time; crop yield
Standard soil analysis suite: SOM, SOC, pH, EC, K, P, N, CaCO3
TiCat: focus on Mobile/Immobile cation ratio changes in solids over time

(to assess dissolution rate)

Soil microbiology: to assess the role of microbes in ERW

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Early results ERW application after 3 seasons

Crops

Crop health positively influenced by basalt addition
Crop yield >15% improvement by ERW

Soil

Increase SOC>0.5%. Large scatter in data: No clear differences between crops & amount of basalt
TiCat: results on test samples suggest method could (just) work to assess basalt dissolution rate
Soil microbiology: clear differences between crop type and treatment. Only specific microbes dominate the interaction with minerals

Key challenges

Inhomogeneity of soils: signal-to-noise issue
Testing ERW in production farming setting: conflicting priorities
TiCat method needs extremely controlled sampling and analyses protocols to deliver reliable results.
Incongruent dissolution of basalt: poorly defined impact on CDR

Key Question: What is a doable/practical/affordable MRV for ERW in production farming?

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Thank you

WP - 4

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Unlocking the potential of Enhanced Rock Weathering in Africa

Sam Davies - CEO

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What are you doing? (incl. # SHF and Ha. now and in future)

How do you do it? (your secret sauce)

How do you finance your work?

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2024 UNCCD Funded Initial Smallholder ERW Pilot

56 Farmers
30ha
40% yield increases
Tested operational feasibility
Worked with normal practices

Pre-purchases from Milkywire and Frontier - 600 ha

Research Center, lab and deployments in Kisumu

2025 - One Acre Fund Joint Partnership - Large Scale Smallholder Pilot

Proof of concept for scaling
360 farmers
Multiple soil types
Looking for funders

Over 2000 Smallholder Farmers onboarded to waiting list in Kenya - and over 20,000ha of commercial farm land

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What have you learned?

What do you still hope to learn?

What are the implications?

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What did we learn?

Farmers are responsive and open to ERW
Adoption rates were high
Hand spreading > mechanical (for smallholders)
Community members should have key roles (agents, samplers etc)
Agronomic benefits can be HUGE in depleted soils with no inputs

What do we hope to learn

More data from different soil and rock types
Increased MRV and understand smallholder practicality
Longer term social impact

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What is your most significant data/research/operational implementation gap and/or challenge?

Deploying 20t/ha (or higher) at larger operational scale
Measuring CO2 capture at high sample density - bringing costs down
Creating models for soil types to increase feasibility for smallholders

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What capabilities and insights can you offer/share?

What are you looking for from folks on call/field?

What can we share?

Operational learning from real-world deployments with smallholders in Africa
Data on agronomic benefits

What are we looking for?

Expertise on operating with smallholders
Critiques, concerns, diverse opinions - get us out of our bubble!
Opportunities to further research and reduce uncertainties

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