Unveiling The First Commercial ERW Sensor

In the fight against climate change, it’s easy to get paralyzed in front of the scale of the challenge ahead. But sometimes, an obstacle isn’t a barrier; it’s a signal to reimagine what’s possible.

I founded Everest Carbon in late 2022 to help realize the potential of Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW), the practice of spreading ground alkaline rock dust on agricultural land to durably remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. ERW holds vast potential as a carbon removal pathway as it leverages the planet’s natural geochemical carbon removal process and piggybacks on existing infrastructure to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver removals at potentially multi-gigatonne per year scale. I firmly believed this had to become a major player in our climate toolkit. After researching ideal geographies, the race was on and I booked a one-way ticket to India to assemble a team and remove our first tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We quickly pre-sold carbon credits and planned out the first creditable projects. We moved fast and deployed more than 300 tonnes of rock dust within a few months.

But that’s when we hit a major roadblock: measurement. How could we truly know how much CO₂ was being captured in each project? 

The Rock-Hard Reality of Measurement

To help solve this problem, we got on board Dr. Matthias Ginterseder, a world-class chemist who had recently left a Nobel-Prize-winning lab at MIT to make his dent in the climate crisis, to join us as Co-Founder and CTO. Very quickly, we realized that accurately measuring carbon removal in ERW projects was far more challenging at commercial scale than anticipated. Each project required an enormous amount of sample taking, and shipping these samples to labs around the world added high costs and long delays. And the results? They were inconsistent, imprecise, and nowhere near the reliability needed to scale this to a climate-relevant level.

It became clear that, without a more scalable measurement solution, ERW couldn’t reach its full potential. We made the difficult decision to halt our projects, and step back from our pre-purchase contracts as we are unable to deliver the promised credits with the verification sophistication we held up on ourselves.

Our mission didn’t change, but the path to getting there needed to.
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Rethinking ERW Measurement from First-Principles 

It seemed clear that if we wanted to create an ERW industry that avoids the previous scandals of other nature-based solutions, we had to create a measurement solution that can be so cost-effective at scale that it actually makes sense to measure, rather than relying purely on models. The challenge in measuring carbon removals through ERW accurately and affordably is that you have to measure tiny amounts of carbonate alkalinity in small amounts of leachate water that leave the field across large land areas and a timescale spanning years. You also have to measure that in a time-integrated manner, meaning your equipment needs to measure the total cumulative amount of alkalinity at all times, as the weathering process takes place whenever there is non-zero soil moisture.

Ion-exchange resins (IER) naturally represent the ideal measurement approach to this challenge, as they passively and completely accumulate ions of traversing water streams through chemical reactions. However, IERs are typically not very selective in the type of ions they accumulate, meaning you have to post-hoc disentangle your captured ion-mix through expensive measurements in a chemical lab and making it practically impossible for a sensor to measure in the field how much carbonate alkalinity has been accumulated. It was clear to us that making this measurement paradigm work was the holy grail for ERW quantification, so we went all-in.

Our result? A patent-pending, first-of-its-kind sensor technology that builds on a special-purpose IER that is highly selective in its uptake of carbonate alkalinity and can thus reliably generate a digitized accumulative measurement of its efflux right in the field. No extraction and lab analysis are required. The sensor can be buried at several tens of centimeters underground to directly measure the additional carbonate alkalinity efflux generated by ERW deployments in the field as water passes through the cylinder-shaped measurement cell. This brings our customers lab-level precision to their project site—eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming manual sample taking and lab analysis!

We quickly received an overwhelming pull for our concept from credit buyers, investors, and fellow carbon credit project developers and knew we were onto something. Around this time, we were also introduced to Jonte Boysen, a Wharton graduate and former Direct-Air-Capture (DAC) executive looking to move into ERW. In January 2024, with Jonte coming onboard as our third Co-Founder, we officially pivoted Everest to being a measurement technology company and moved our R&D facility to Linz, Austria. Following a different strategy with the same bold vision: a world where ERW is removing billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year with ironclad trust based on highly accurate, affordable measurements. 

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Fast-Forward to Today

In under a year, the team has turned a breakthrough concept into a product that’s already in customer's hands. We’ve developed countless prototypes, filed patents, run our own field tests, and shipped our first units. Alongside this progress, we raised venture capital to catch up with the strong demand from our ambitious customers, the real heroes in this story: The project developers who are set to deploy many Megatonnes of rock dust in the next few years already and are urgently looking for an accurate, affordable, and scalable solution to measure and verify their removals.

Over the coming months, we’ll be scaling up sensor deployments across new geographies globally and launching initiatives to accelerate the scaling of the ERW industry. Our mission is to bring reliable, cost-effective carbon removal measurements to project developers everywhere.

If you’re a project developer seeking to elevate your ERW measurements, an investor interested in scaling climate technology, or a talented individual looking to make your impact in climate - let’s connect and move the planet toward a sustainable future!

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Pascal Michel
Co-Founder and CEO