Startup Terradot is one of the newest companies setting out to remove carbon pollution from the atmosphere, and investments from Google, Microsoft, and other sources will help it reach that goal, Bloomberg reported.
Right now, industries and individuals all over the planet are putting too much carbon dioxide into the air, mostly by burning dirty fuels, the UN reported. Since carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas, that's heating the planet up and contributing to natural disasters.
The obvious solution, besides emitting less carbon, is to pull some out of the air — and the good news is that there are natural processes that do that. The problem is that those processes are slow, which is where Terradot comes in.
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Definitely 👍 "We know this can happen, and our quest is just to make it fast," Scott Fendorf, Terradot's chief scientific and technical advisor, told Bloomberg.
To do that, Terradot uses enhanced rock weathering (ERW), Bloomberg explained. ERW involves crushing and spreading out rocks like basalt, exposing them to rain. When the water hits the stone, it causes a chemical reaction that pulls carbon out of the air. The water full of carbon drains away into the soil and eventually to the ocean, where it stays long-term.
If you're picturing big fields full of nothing but gravel, wasting space, think again. Terradot offers the crushed rock to farmers to use in their fields to correct the pH of their soil. It then monitors the carbon content of those fields to make sure the rock is doing its job.
That monitoring is a key reason that major investors are interested in Terradot, Bloomberg reports. Other ERW companies exist, but Terradot actually has data to prove that it's delivering on its carbon removal promises.
Investor John Doerr called Terradot's science team the "strongest" in the trade, per Bloomberg, and Google's carbon credits and removals lead, Randy Spock, agreed that it was a factor.
Google has bought 200,000 tons of carbon credits from Terradot, and Microsoft has bought 90,000. Thus far, the company has raised $60 million to get started.
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