Carbon Drawdown Initiative

We at Carbon Drawdown Initiative are building up new experiments and as always that means we need a whole lot of buckets…😉

Nonprofits can’t solve the climate crisis. They started the work, and now it’s time to build the industry to get the job done. The climate crisis has become so massive, it requires massive effort to slow and eventually undo the damage. We need to remove several gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year, and the scale at which work needs to happen requires substantial capital. Our goal of net neutrality by 2050 requires science, machinery, and infrastructure developed around the world. I am convinced that despite fantastic intentions, nonprofit organizations simply can’t attract the necessary funds through donations or grants. We need to build carbon capture and storage options in a way that doesn’t do more harm than good, and we need to do it at a scale that makes it cost effective. Over time, the new industry can support itself and progress the science in tandem with the proven methods of carbon drawdown. What we need now are business models to attract investors. What’s the ROI on enhanced rock weathering? What about carbon storage? It’s great to want to save the planet, yet we should not be so naive to think idealism will pay all the bills. Investors need to see a viable path to profitability so they commit their capital to building the tools necessary to effectively impact the climate crisis. Successful carbon reduction requires money, and we’re still figuring out the business models to make it happen. What do you think will encourage investors to join in?

We have helped to start another project that aims to vitalize the CDR market: Benjamin Schulz‘s Ascent 1 targets at 50,000 tons!

Two years after starting our EW greenhouse experiment we have dismantled 320 of 400 pots and we will continue to monitor 80. Over the next weeks we will build the next set of pots while doubling the size of the experiment. For EW science! Onwards! www.carbon-drawdown.de

Carbon Drawdown Initiative is an early seed investor in 25 startups (and counting) committed to do tangible work against the climate crisis. Entrepreneurs, brilliant scientists, and activists are developing impactful carbon reduction strategies, and Carbon Drawdown Initiative has chosen to seize a unique opportunity to come alongside them and support their important work. These investments represent varied approaches to CDR to maximize the potential of tangible climate impact as soon as possible. From ocean alkalization to direct air capture, we’re tackling the problem of carbon emissions from many angles. Any of these nascent scientific concepts could provide a breakthrough tomorrow—so we invest in the most promising ones. We’re even getting our hands dirty, testing enhanced rock weathering in our own backyards and building greenhouse experiments. Our collaboration with universities and research institutes paints a hopeful picture. Humans have made a mess of our beautiful planet’s atmosphere—and we’re on a mission to clean it up. Thinking of it as building a new garbage collection industry is actually very fitting.

Now it is official: sequestra is the 26th climate/CDR startup in our impact investment portfolio! Go, Lukas Höber, Roberto Lerche and Gero Schwarz !

Two Reasons to Be Amazed – Our Latest Podcast on Enhanced Weathering & AI’s Rapid Evolution When we set out to run the world’s largest greenhouse Enhanced Weathering (EW) experiment, we expected to measure carbon dioxide removal (CDR) by tracking alkalinity in soil leachate. What we didn’t expect was to uncover a “cation-eating monster soil” that trapped essential weathering products—or a “procrastinating basalt” that refused to release cations quickly enough. These surprises, along with thousands of chemical and physical soil measurements, forced us to rethink what really drives effective CDR through EW. Now, thanks to AI, you don’t even have to read our full white paper to dive into these insights! Using Google’s NotebookLM, we have generated an entire AI-narrated podcast episode based on our research. This episode doesn’t just showcase the highs and lows of our greenhouse experiment—it also demonstrates just how far AI has come in synthesizing scientific knowledge and presenting it in a compelling format. You can be amazed twice: once by the surprising results of our EW experiments, and again by the fact that this podcast was completely AI-generated. Curious? Listen now and experience the future of both carbon removal and AI-powered storytelling. Listen to this podcast on our substack: https://lnkd.in/dEZUQj5K

Felix Harteneck von unserem Portfolio-Unternehmen InPlanet berichtet im Klimanachbarn-Podcast von seiner Arbeit mit beschleunigter Verwitterung in Brasilien => Carbon Removal in Südamerika

What We Learned from the World’s Largest Greenhouse Experiment The Unexpected Challenges of Enhanced Weathering Over the past four years, we conducted the world’s largest greenhouse EW experiment, aiming to measure carbon dioxide removal (CDR) across different soil-rock combinations (all soils came from Germany). Instead of clear-cut CDR effects, we first encountered a “procrastinating basalt”—a rock that barely contributed to measurable increase in leachate alkalinity(i.e. our definition of CDR effect for this experiment)—and a “cation-eating monster soil” that trapped essential weathering products, preventing them from being transported as expected. Our dataset, built from 6,500 water samples, 4,500 manual titrations, and 2,000 ICP-MS runs, revealed a striking conclusion: not all soil-rock combinations lead to meaningful alkalinity-based CDR effects within relevant timeframes. In fact, more than half of our tested variations failed to show a statistically significant increase in alkalinity-based carbon removal over two years, a critical window for scaling EW as a viable climate solution. However, our experiment also uncovered successful soil-rock pairings. Steel slag, an industrial byproduct, emerged as the most effective amendment, achieving CDR rates of up to 2.8 tCO₂ per hectare per year. This reinforces the importance of dissolution kinetics and material surface area in determining the effectiveness of rock amendments for carbon sequestration. These findings have major implications for the future of EW. Instead of relying solely on theoretical weathering rates, we need big data approaches and machine learning models to predict the best-performing soil-rock combinations. The climate crisis does not allow us the luxury of decades-long trial-and-error approaches—we must accelerate the identification of effective EW strategies now. Our study raises fundamental questions for the EW community: Why do some soils “eat” cations? Are these cations lost for CDR or just retarded? How can we better predict successful weathering outcomes? And how do we ensure reliable, quantifiable carbon credits for EW projects? In 2025 we will extent our experiments using two strategies: 1. As we are currently dismantling the experiment we are taking a load of soil samples which will be processed to find clues on what happened in the soil: Have the cations been lost (e.g. to clay formation) or will they be helpful with CDR some time in the future? 2. We are going to set up an even more ambitious follow-up experiment. The full white paper provides a detailed analysis of our findings, challenges, and next steps. Visit our blog to explore the insights shaping the future of Enhanced Weathering. https://lnkd.in/dn57DnVQ

Advancing CDR requires good data. In the area of Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW), look no further than Dirk Paessler's Carbon Drawdown Initiative wherein Dirk and Ralf Steffens work to measure how fast CO2 is removed under different soil conditions. With the help of their robot army of flux meters, they are creating a database with the data that is needed. Enjoy this snippet or, perhaps watch Legion 44 + remove some carbon while you are at it. http://www.legion44.world