Terradot Is Solving Climate Change with Crushed Rocks on Farmland

Chemical rock weathering is one of the planet’s primary climate regulators. It removes about one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year.

The process is chemically basic: carbonic acid in rainwater reacts with rock minerals, forming bicarbonate compounds that flow into the ocean and are used by marine organisms. The byproducts of this process are long-term carbon sinks that last for millions of years.

Terradot is a climate-tech company founded in 2022 at Stanford University to scale this process. It says it is “transforming nature’s most powerful permanent carbon removal process into a global climate solution.”

The company uses enhanced rock weathering (ERW), a technology-driven process that accelerates the natural weathering and carbon capture process. Crushed silicate rocks are spread onto farmlands and forest floors where they mix with rainwater and CO₂ to form stable bicarbonates. Although it is more expensive than afforestation, ERW offers longer-term carbon storage, requires less land use change, and boosts soil fertility.

Terradot is headquartered in San Francisco, but its operations are based in São Paulo, Brazil. The company cites Brazil’s tropical soils, clean electricity grid, and extensive quarry networks as key factors in this decision. It has partnered with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) on pilot projects in the region.

Terradot started as an independent project by James Kanoff and Sasankh Munutla to scale carbon sequestration. Scott Fendorf, a professor of Earth System Science and head of the soil and environmental lab at Stanford, serves as the company’s chief scientist. They ran their first pilot project on 250 hectares of farmland in Mexico.

Despite enhanced rock weathering’s promise, a major challenge stems from the difficulty of measuring and verifying how much carbon is captured, especially for the purpose of issuing carbon credits. Terradot’s approach to this challenge is a combination of soil sampling and biogeochemical modeling of downstream impact.

With financial support from companies like Microsoft, Google, and John Doerr, Terradot has acquired a research site in Brazil, named Sentinel, that allows the company to “track the full carbon journey–from basalt applied to fields, through soils and aquifers, to groundwater that ultimately resurfaces in streams.” The company has also assembled a scientific team to optimize the process of measuring the climate impact of its work.

In an interview with Gigascale Capital, Terradot CEO James Kanoff says his company isn’t focused on becoming the next global tech giant. Instead, they want to demonstrate that enhanced rock weathering is effective and help other organizations implement it.

Governments around the world are still urged to prioritize emissions reduction, but carbon removal can be an effective complementary measure.

Terradot isn’t the only company working on enhanced rock weathering solutions. Eion Carbon, Puro, and Boomitra are also building carbon removal projects leveraging the natural process of chemical weathering.