InPlanet is an enhanced weathering company spreading rock dust on agricultural fields to draw down CO2. In November, it announced a new investment of $4.6 million from a group of investors. Based in Germany, InPlanet collaborates with farmers in Brazil, aiming to remove 1 million tonnes of CO2 by 2026.
As they work to scale their operations, they face a similar challenge all ERW operations are dealing with right now. While the basic science of rock weathering is well understood, accurately measuring CO2 removal in real-world conditions remains a significant hurdle.
Ensuring trust in the process will require improved measurement and verification from what exists today- a problem InPlanet is working to solve.
On this episode we’re joined by InPlanet’s Head of Carbon Matthew Clarkson who recently released pre-print research evaluating the different methods of measuring CO2 removal from rock weathering and made recommendations for areas of improvement.
ERW is technologically ready, has co-benefits, and has already attracted significant investment. It is ready to grow to climate relevant scale- but only if it can be properly measured.
On this episode we’ll talk with Matthew about his MRV research, working on the ground with Brazilian farmers, and what hurdles he sees to InPlanet’s goal of megatonne removal in the next three years.
On This Episode
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Bloomberg article on ERW funding
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Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: InPlanet is an enhanced weathering company spreading rock dust on agricultural fields to draw down carbon dioxide. Based in Germany, InPlanet collaborates with farmers in Brazil aiming to remove 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2026. While the basic science of rock weathering is well understood, accurately measuring carbon dioxide removal in real-world conditions remains a significant hurdle. Ensuring trust in the process will require improved measurement and verification from what exists today, a problem InPlanet is working to solve. So today I’m happy to welcome on Carbon Removal Newsroom, InPlanet’s head of carbon, Matthew Clarkson, who recently released a preprint research paper evaluating methods of measuring carbon dioxide removal from rock weathering and made recommendations for areas of improvement.
Matthew, it is so nice to have you on the show.
Matthew Clarkson: Really nice to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, yes. And so while ERW is technologically ready and has many co-benefits and has already attracted significant investment, it is ready to grow, but we have to answer the questions being posed. So today we’ll talk to Matthew about his MRV research, what it’s like working on the ground with Brazilian farmers and what hurdles he sees in the next three years. All right, let’s start just with a little bit about you, Matthew. So you worked as a geochemist studying past changes in the Earth’s climate prior to your carbon removal career. So how did that work lead you to rock weathering and what insights can you share from that previous geochemist work as you serve the changes happening today?
Matthew Clarkson: Yeah, it’s been a long journey through academia for me. I’ve been an academic about 10 years before making this transition into the private sector. And as you mentioned, most of that was based around research, looking at the global climate system, looking at natural carbon cycling through Earth’s history. And I had a particular focus looking at how the climate recovers. I really wanted to understand how the Earth stops global warming. That’s a very fundamental question. How does this system recover from perturbations? Basically, I spent a lot of time looking at these different events and looking at them through the lens of different geochemical tools.
And we see in the past that the earth does recover. We see evidence for silicate weathering. We see evidence that the biosphere will suddenly bloom and take up some of this CO2. But we also see that it takes hundreds of thousands of years to millions of years in order to recover, which is kind of a scary prospect if you think about the perturbation that we’re in right now. And how long it might take the climate to naturally recover if we were to do nothing. And so I kind of made that transition.
Also, some personal motivation of starting a family suddenly makes you think about things differently and about the impacts that we can have as scientists. And it was a natural transition then to look for something in the CDR sector. Really great timing as well as this CDR sector is really blossoming right now and There’s a huge call for geochemists and biogeochemists like me within the industry to bring that scientific rigor and to think about how we can scale solutions.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, your background seems ideally suited to what you have moved on to in the private sector. So let’s talk a little bit about the preprint article about enhanced rock weathering measurement. At a very basic level, what did you find in your research?
Matthew Clarkson: Yeah, I think the first thing is that I’m actually surprised so many people are reading this. It’s had like 1500 views or more, which is more than I imagined probably from some of my academic work. And essentially this manuscript marks my transition from academia into the private sector where I sort of had this realization that there’s a lot of questions around how we measure enhanced rock revering. But the science, the fundamentals behind those measurement techniques are well established. And I was sort of faced with this challenge of trying to help educate people to understand the science.
And my goal was really to try and demystify it, to break down what does MRV mean for enhanced rock weathering. And so with my co-authors who are another two from Mplanet, Christina Larkin, the head of science, Philip Svoboda. We had two co-authors from Yale, so Tom Rishimus, Jesper M. Surhoff. We had from Harriet Watt, we had James Campbell and Cara Masono from RMI. And sort of we banded together to create this document, which was largely just, yeah, trying to demystify the science and provide that foundational basis of how we make measurements.
And although people often wonder about like, how do we prove that we’ve removed this invisible gas? Well, we do have options. We have, we can trace the carbon and we can also trace the rock dissolution. These are two fundamental ways to understand CDR within the context of EW. And essentially there’s two approaches that we can take that lay the foundation of all MRB that everyone’s doing today. And that’s, we can look at solid phases, which is the rock powder in the soils, and we can look at liquids, which is soil waters.
And I’ve been trying to translate this into analogy over the last couple of months to help communicate this a little bit. And if you imagine you have a hot drink in front of you and someone has added some sugar to it, When you want to verify this, you want to check that they added a certain amount of sugar to it. But the question is, how do you do that? Well, one option could be just to pour out the drink and then you can see maybe this residue of the sugar at the end.
And that would be like taking solid phase measurements. So what you’re looking for is the rock powder that has not dissolved. So what’s left? And by proxy, you know what has dissolved and how much CO2 has been removed. The other option could be to taste the drink and then you figure out how sweet it is. And that is analogous to a liquid phase measurement. So there you’re looking to see the product of the rock dissolution. But when you drink it, you also get other things. You get more information. You know how hot it is.
You know if it’s tea or coffee, you can probably take a sample and measure caffeine if you wanted. And that’s what we can do with soil waters. So we can look for, for example, calcium and magnesium that come from the rock powders. But we can also measure bicarbonate, which is the direct carbon that has been removed through the process. We can also measure pH and then we can look for different acid types. There’s a whole bunch of different measurements we can make on top. And essentially we need both of these approaches because they both have positives and negatives, but those tools are available to us as scientists and they are the foundation of the MRV approaches moving forwards.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So I have a little follow-up question for clarification, for me at least, on both Types of measurement that you were describing, both the solid and the liquid, is there a point in time where it is most important to do it? When describing the liquid phase, I was imagining that stuff would leach out along the way, measurements would change. And so where in the process or where in the timeframe do you need to do these measurements?
Matthew Clarkson: Yeah, that’s a great question. And that’s really, it’s also a central topic of discussion right now in terms of the academic community and There’s a group called Cascade Climate who are trying to help open systems develop methodologies for CDR. And this is a big topic. So I should say the manuscript was really focusing on what can we measure at the weathering zone in the field. But there are processes that then happen to that carbon that has been removed. So as it moves down the river to the ocean, some of it is lost.
And we can estimate how much is lost. We can use data sets and calculation methods or models to figure that out. So it’s really focusing on the field environment. And yes, so the liquids, I think there’s a lot less experience with liquid measurements at the moment because it requires a lot of effort to take the samples. So we tend to go to the field after every single rain event, and this is roughly weekly to biweekly to certain field locations. But the benefit of doing that is that we can really see the carbon.
We can see what is being exported from the system. So yes, that The carbon that’s in the pool waters is going to interact with the soils. It’s going to reach a new equilibrium. It will transfer through the soil. But if we can measure it after each rain event, we have a good record of that carbon export through time. And if you compare that to the solid phase approach that you could do every year, you could go once a year, take samples, see how much rock pound is dissolved. And then you have to make assumptions and calculations about all the other things that are going on in this.
What is a complex system, but it is a system that we can break down.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so this flows nicely into the next question, which is, you know, your measurement approaches as you describe them are very localized in small batches probably. So how do you imagine scaling this over large areas or will it be a model-based approach? What do you think will be the future?
Matthew Clarkson: Yeah, so I think calling them small batches might be a slight understatement. So we are, it is definitely small scale, but it’s still on sort of multiple thousand hectare plots is the way we’re performing it. But it is absolutely a long way from the scale that we need to reach for the IPCC targets. You know, we need to get to that gigatonne potential that EW has. And that’s absolutely right. We do eventually need to move to sort of in the mid to long term towards model approaches. But right now is about collecting enough data, surplus data that we can be confident in those models.
So another finding from the manuscript that we wrote was that the models just aren’t there yet, that they can’t capture the complexity of a soil system. But with the research efforts going on in industry right now, we can collect enough data to validate them and to create something that’s workable and usable, probably on a faster timescale than we would imagine if this just sat in academia for a while. So right now is all about taking more measurements than we need. It’s about surplus measurement types and more samples than we require.
And by doing so, we’re hoping to pass down over one or two weathering cycles. So for us, that would be like on an annual basis. We can see those results and get it down to something that’s more scalable. So like reducing sample numbers, maybe reducing some of the metrics we measure to really focus on the essentials. But looking forwards, there’s also other options that are available to us. So actually a lot of the natural sciences that have been done to study weathering have looked at catchment scales. So rather than looking at individual samples in a field, we could take samples from a river, for example.
And there’s some examples of this already in the literature. So in the paper of my colleague, Christina Larkin working in Malaysia, they were sampling drainage channels that feed into rivers. So there are ways to sort of scale up already from that side. And then other things we’re excited about at the moment is sensor technology as well. Of course, everyone loves a bit of hardware technology in startups. We have a grant at the MoMA, which was facilitated by one of our partners through CarbonX. And this was specifically as a research grant.
So it was from a customer who wants to support the research, but not necessarily fund and purchase credits. And that this has facilitated a research project this year. So we can try out different sensor methods and different techniques and try them in the field, see if that’s going to solve the problem of remote Hemavi.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So your description did raise another question for me about how you all work together as different competing startups. It sounds like there’s a lot of need for data sharing, but obviously you’re also competing in a way for funding and selling of credits potentially. So how are you all working together and do you all sort of use the same approach or are there other approaches other companies are considering? Yeah.
Matthew Clarkson: Yeah, so absolutely correct. I think there’s something like 20 enhanced wearing companies now. So a new one popping up every month almost, which is amazing to see. And what’s clear is that everyone’s working in their own sort of situation right now. So some people at US focus working on certain crop types. Some are looking at temperate conditions in the UK. We’re looking at tropical conditions in Brazil, which has advantages and we’ve sort of really tried to maximize those benefits. So of course, everyone’s sort of figuring out their own situation. In terms of collaboration, we do meet as an industry.
We have industry working groups. We’ve recently actually just launched the Enhanced Weathering Alliance, which I think is about 90% of current suppliers, plus support from organizations like Frontier and Carbon Future, the Carbon Drawdown Initiative. Yes, and RMI are also interested in helping out in terms of political support. And the idea is that we’ve created a common voice when it comes to policy, but from the more technical side as well, it creates a framework in which we can hopefully work together more closely. When it comes to data sharing and transparency, I think this is absolutely key.
And it’s great to see, again, referring back to Cascade Climate’s work, they’re really trying to create this framework where there could be a review board where we submit our data to that can be used for research purposes and to amalgamate all those data and learning.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it’s such a nascent industry. We all sort of need to be transparent, but there’s obviously competing pressures around that. And I’m also curious, you spoke of working with Yale on this paper. And so how do you work with academic partners in this way? And how do you choose the academic partners best suited? Or do they find you? Like, what’s that like?
Matthew Clarkson: Yeah, so it’s an interesting topic and it’s been a really interesting experience seeing this from the industry side. And I think people are very quick to around terms like conflict of interest because, you know, of course, we’re working in industry, there’s a conflict of interest. But I think what that forgets is that we are trained scientists. Our science team has excellent researchers who have had academic careers. We are experienced at doing this. Soil scientists, hydrology, microbe experts, agronomy, you know, we’ve got a bit of everything in the team. And so we’re in a position to make fair scientific judgments.
I think that is something that we need to remember. It’s not always about conflict of interest, although we do, of course, have to declare it. But in terms of choosing people that we work with, it’s largely like any business. It’s about personal connections. It’s about who we enjoy working with, who we trust, who we understand. And so, yeah, it’s about having those connections. Some of those exist from our previous academic careers as a science board, but other people I’ve met along this journey of my transition and built up a relationship and they have the common goal and we’re united in that front.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I just was listening to a webinar on MCDR and Marine CDR and though the person was like, Please come and work in academics because all the CDR companies are stealing our academics, but we still need them doing the basic research. So I’ll be curious to see how all this develops over the next 10 to 15 years.
Matthew Clarkson: It’s super interesting, isn’t it? And those have to be collaborative because some of these are long problems that academia can help solve. And some of them are industry problems that we need the innovation to drive solutions. So yeah, both will come together and there’s no way academia would be running trials on a thousand hectares. So yeah, that’s where the power of the industry and the power of the carbon finance actually comes through.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I know, I totally agree. And I have children getting ready to go to college soon and I’m hoping some of them end up getting it. PhDs in some of these topics so they can go off and work in the CDR industry. Last question sort of around this funding and science piece is, you know, one of I think the challenges and tensions within CDR, right, is it’s a very highly rigorously science-based fundamental underpinning. However, it’s often funded with VC dollars who are not always known for their patients that some of these scientific trials take.
So as you are kind of transitioning into a business setting and seeing maybe some of these dynamics for the first time firsthand, how do you think about it and how does your company maneuver those pressures?
Matthew Clarkson: Yeah, that is a new aspect for me completely. But it’s really exciting to see these dynamics and that there are different pieces to the funding models. So VCs, for example, the people who have invested in enhanced rock weathering They are very sophisticated in terms of an investor and they understand what this is as a technology. They also understand the fact that it takes time for rocks to dissolve. It takes time to gather that data. It takes time to deliver the carbon. I think a lot of them are understanding of the situation and they’re essentially betting on CDR as a whole, on a whole market moving forwards.
And this is a technology that let’s not forget whenever we are right now, this is 2024. We’re establishing an industry that has to be like fully fledged by 2040 to hit targets in 2050. So this is a long game and I know a lot of people aren’t really Used to thinking on those timescales. As a geologist, of course, this is nothing to me, but, you know, 20, 30 years, but that’s, you know, it’s not typical for thinking of an industry. And I think a lot of the sophistication also transfers across to a lot of the first movers in this market as well.
So people like Frontier who are enabling these early purchases, Microsoft, for example, CarbonX, who are facilitating these. These transactions with other customers, we have people who are interested. They want to try this out. They want to help move the industry forward. And they want to do some good, of course. But they understand that it’s about being catalytic at the moment. It’s about getting the industry going. And that’s what people are buying into. And I think as we move into this next phase where we have to be more revenue based, things are going to change certainly.
And one of the big challenges we face is that we have to pay and undertake a project under our own costs, but then we can get paid for it upon delivery, which could be a year later. It could be two, three, four years. People are making these orders up to say 20, 30. So that’s a substantial upfront investment that’s required, particularly with stringent MRV. It’s not cheap to take these samples.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. Tell me about it. I work in soil organic carbon. And so I, yeah, soil sampling is not trivial either from the work or the cost. Okay. I want to.
Matthew Clarkson: It’s going to be when you act for sugar cane plantations. Yeah.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. Sugar plant, right. Yeah. For sure. We haven’t even ventured into that space for soil carbon. So yeah, let’s talk about Brazil. You’re working obviously there with farmers. And so what induces a farmer to work with you all and to spread this rock on their fields?
Matthew Clarkson: I should make a clarification here as well. So it’s not that we’re just headquartered in Germany and working in Brazil. Our company is a dual headquarters. We have entities in both countries. I think almost 50% or more of our team are Brazilian. So we’re very much about on the ground presence and community and developing something in the country. And then the rest of us are working remote all over the world actually, like Trinidad, New York. It’s really fantastic culture from that, from that aspect. So I think this is key to it.
It is creating this relationship and partnership. And that’s what we’re looking for with farmers and other project partners is a real collaboration. And so a lot of this comes down to helping a farmer understand the potential benefits of this in Brazil. The soils are heavily degraded in the tropics and particularly in Brazil. The continent has sat there for millions of years and has had heavy rains for a long time and there’s very little nutrients left in those soils. And particularly when you start bringing in intensive agriculture as well and you’re applying fertilizers, the soil really needs a helping hand.
And that’s where the rock powders can come in as a remineralizer. So they’re bringing a slow release nutrient fertilizer into the soils that gives a very complete mixture of nutrients, but can also raise the pH of the soil. So it can substitute the line, for example. And so it’s all about helping people understand the potential that we can improve the soil health to a more sustainable way. And this, I think really touches a lot of farmers because they are looking for a better solution that helps them with their yields. It helps them with the management and it helps the climate.
But there’s still a lot of barriers to overcome. It sounds like a magic solution. You know, let’s just... Get rid of the chemical fertilizers, but it’s a lot more nuanced than that. And there’s risks and there’s barriers, particularly with the financial investment into the powders, the risk for crops, the lack of education, the technical support. And this is where the additionality sort of comes into this practice is we need the carbon finance to overcome all of these barriers to help people make that transition and really set people up for the future.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So I don’t I don’t believe you’re in Brazil, but when we have talked to a lot of guests on the show about the challenges of public acceptance, I mean, as broadly of for CDR generally all the way down to different methods. And so as you’ve been working or your company has been working with Brazilian farmers, what have what have you learned about acceptance within local communities? What advice would you give to people who are working within those communities? And these who are startup entrepreneurs.
Matthew Clarkson: I think engagement is the key and not just going into a place to try and persuade people, but it’s about responsible education to understand people’s concerns. As I was just describing, there’s a lot of potential benefits here and actually conveying that information responsibly is really important, but we do face incumbents, for example, a lot of agronomists have experience With traditional first lives and methods, and they might be resistant to this. So they already have that sort of perception that change is bad, for example. So it’s really about that responsible communication.
And as I said, we’re looking for a partnership, not just access to a land. But I think, so we hold community events, we engage with the farmers, politicians, cooperatives, the mines, scientific institutions, farming groups, agronomists, really try to take this holistic community as sort of view on the whole thing. So in terms of perceptions, I think people are, of course, uncertain about How CDR is perceived in the world. And there’s been a lot of academic studies on this. It hits the press a lot. Why are people in the global South paying for the problem of the global North, but then global South are particularly at risk.
And I think what it comes down to is actually a lot of this is to do with how things are framed and we’re not doing a good job in the media framing these things in an appropriate manner. And I think as academics, it can also be improved. There was a recent study published in Nature Communications looking at the perception of CDR in the Global South. And if you read that, it sounds like solar radiation management and enhanced rock weathering are on the same playing field. But if you actually go through the supplementary information, it turns out people weren’t really told about the technologies.
They were given predominantly the negative aspects of the technology, like the risks. But it doesn’t convey all the potential and the co-benefit. They were shown in a way that was comparable. So it really comes down to what information are people given that allows them to make a judgment that is fair and robust and viable. That’s where the responsible communication needs to go.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So my final question about working in Brazil is kind of tactical. And I’m curious where you source the rock dust from and what kind of your supply chain is into these farms?
Matthew Clarkson: Yeah, so we work on a very local scale. One of the earliest LCAs was done for one of our mines actually. So it was a study in 2019 by David Levepfer and co-authors from Newcastle who looked at the LCA emissions for enhanced rock weathering. And it was very clear from that study that transport is one of the biggest levers in terms of making this efficient for the actual carbon removal. So that the life cycle analysis of the mine is actually not too scary in a way. So overall, we’re looking at around six, 7% of the CDR potential of a rock.
And actually, based on the measurements we have, we know that our deployment is already carbon neutral after one year. I think that’s a really great achievement, but that comes from working locally. So we work within 100 kilometers of the mines. We have a bit of room depending on the chemistry of the rock and You know, trucks, the energy supplies, but we try and work very locally. So we’re working with family owned above ground minds, generally quite small scale, and they produce a rock based materials for the domestic aggregate industry. So, you know, crushing up basalt for roads and buildings, that sort of thing.
They also sell a very fine fraction that goes off to other industries. And there’s this fraction in between, which is actually really good for enhanced rock weathering and a really good fertilizer. So this is around two millimeters down to about 100 microns. And that’s available as a byproduct from that domestic industry. And that’s where we can come in and purchase that and supply it to the farmers. In Brazil, we have a particular situation as well because there were forward thinking in terms of the legal legislation around fertilizers. And these rock powders are actually already certified for agronomic use, which means that they’ve gone through checks for mineralogy.
There’s no asbestos. They’ve gone through checks for the metal concentrations. They’ve been tested for leach to see what comes off when they’re treated with water. And so it’s very forward thinking. It’s still not common practice to use these at all. There’s less than 1% of the total agronomic area in Brazil that actually has tried rock powders. But the legal structure is there. And the difference is in Europe, this comes under some of the fertilizer regimes and you can think of it, I think the European, the EU call it an amendment for raising pH in soils.
They have these descriptive terms and that’s where your rock powders could go. But it’s another step then to have it certified as a fertilizer. Whereas what we can do in Brazil is already know that what we’re using is safe.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Very forward thinking of Brazil. Really interesting. Was that a relatively recent development or have they had that on the books for a while?
Matthew Clarkson: So it actually knows that there’s an academic movement that became sort of overlapping with industry since around the 40s, 50s called the Rochegem Movement. Really picked up in the 80s when there was academic interest in trying to move this forward. And then it was in 2016 that they got the legal framework together. But then there’s so many barriers still in place that it’s just not common practice yet. And actually, interest in rock powders on a small scale has happened in many different places around the world. So in Canada, they’ve used wollastonite for a while.
If we look in Germany and Asia, In New Zealand, parts of Africa as well, there are examples where people have used rock powders as a fertilizer, but it’s really never gained this common practice status. That’s something then, again, where the carbon finance comes in.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. So let’s turn to my last couple of questions, which is how you’re thinking about scaling as a company. So you’ve an announced goal of removing a million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2026. So you’re about... 18 months, 20 months from the start of 2026. So why did you set that goal and how did you choose that number?
Matthew Clarkson: Yeah, so it’s ambitious. I should clarify that the million tonnes won’t be removed by 2026, but it’s to have deployed enough to reach that scale. And it is an ambitious target. But if we look at where we need to be in 2050, if we need to get the industry going, that’s the pace, that’s the urgency required for the climate problem. So we really need to aim for those big numbers. It’s ambitious, but it In a sense, it’s what’s needed to demonstrate the technology as well. So as I was talking about before with these, you know, a thousand hectare research plots, we need multiple of these all around the world run by different companies in different climates.
So those targets, those big targets are important. And yeah, it’s just really necessary to drive the market development as well. It shows the interest. That’s how we’re going to get the minds involved. That’s how we’re going to get to that scale by having these ambitious targets.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And as you were noting earlier, right, ERW is growing like crazy if you just look at the number of startups at least entering the field. So what makes you most optimistic about ERW? But first answer, what are the constraints you’re most concerned on? What are the things that at night you’re like, oh, these are the big challenges that W faces as an industry?
Matthew Clarkson: So I think the biggest challenge that I feel almost every day is that there are so many moving pieces in this new industry. And I think anyone in CDR can resonate with that. Regulations are changing by the month. Policy frameworks are changing. Might be ready by 2027, 28, but we need to operate now before they exist. So we have to guess what’s happening. We have to do our best scientific efforts to make it robust, but these pieces are always changing. And that’s one of the big challenges. So this year, we had the first standards from Puro Earth for enhanced rock weathering in 2022, which is a great sort of start to the industry.
And then 2024, we’ve just had the isometric, do the first public consultation on their standards. And then we have the Cascade, which is developing the community standard. There’s things popping up, which is what we expect in an early industry, but it does make for a very turbulent Halfway when we’re setting our objectives, because everything changes very quickly. So you have to be very agile. So really it’s changing demands, changing policies. We need to operate on projects that are going to operate over five years, but we’re making decisions today and the framework is changing.
So that’s to me, one of the biggest challenges.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I’ve been in the industry for three and a half years and it’s changed dramatically. It’s pretty fascinating. But then what keeps you going? What gets you out of bed? What are you most excited about for the next few years within ERW?
Matthew Clarkson: So the scientist in me is still addicted to data and I’m really excited. Every time we get a notification, oh, we’ve got new gas data, we’ve got new liquids data, we’ve got new solids data. But I spend less time looking at that than I used to. So I think Generally, I think I’m super excited by the fact that so much is being done right now and we’re gathering these insights over the first few years of weathering and we’re seeing great results. We’re seeing clear weathering signals from liquids, which other people haven’t seen before.
We’re seeing all this evidence coming together. Part of this is because we’re operating in the tropics with really high weathering rates. We’ve got a really good rock powder. So it’s really exciting to see this. EW is not just some niche biogeochemical experiment. It’s something that’s working in the field, or at least that’s what we’re seeing evidence for. And I think the really exciting thing is that the potential for scaling EW is so huge. We don’t need to build like a huge plant, like a DAC plant. We don’t need to build a BEX facility.
This is about taking something that exists, optimizing it and introducing it into the practice of a farmer who would already be spreading something on the field, but now they can spread something and remove CO2. It doesn’t require any land use change. It’s not that we’re taking energy from a different place. So if there’s a lot of these sort of bigger ecosystem problems that just don’t really are so much of a problem for enhanced revering. And that’s the excitement that there’s so much potential. In Brazil, we could cover 100% of the NDCs with enhanced rock weathering.
And it’s comparable in Europe, we could cover 20-30% of NDCs. So, you know, the potential is there and seeing this emergence of the data that’s backing it up is really fantastic.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, Matthew, thank you so much for walking us through your work and how ImPlanet is approaching it. As always, I look forward to seeing how things develop. It is an exciting and turbulent time, as you said.
Matthew Clarkson: It is. Thanks very much for the questions and interviews.
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