Terradot Has Sold Nearly 300,000 Tonnes of CO2 Removal – A Record for Enhanced Rock Weathering
December 12, 2024 06:55 AM Eastern Standard Time
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Terradot – a climate company uniting global leaders in science, technology, and climate – launched today with the goal of scaling Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) as a cornerstone of global carbon removal efforts. The company debuts with $58.2 million in funding from some of the biggest names in climate and technology, as well as signed agreements to remove nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO2 from earth’s atmosphere – the largest volume of carbon removal sold by an ERW company.
The carbon removal agreements include a 90,000 tonne, $27 million purchase by Frontier buyers for delivery between 2025 and 2029. Google, a Frontier member, has signed an additional deal with Terradot to remove 200,000 tonnes in 2029 and beyond – representing the tech giant’s largest single purchase of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and also its largest single purchase from an enhanced weathering project. Early purchases from Frontier buyers for deployments between 2025 and 2030 will lower the price per ton, allowing Google to benefit from reduced costs for the later deployment.
Terradot’s investors include Lead, John Doerr; Individuals, Sheryl Sandberg & Tom Bernthal, George Roberts; Strategics, Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Google, Cisco; and Venture Funds, Floodgate, Kleiner Perkins, Acre Venture Partners, Gigascale Capital, Valor Capital, Ponderosa Ventures and others. The $58.2 million in funding includes $4.2 million in seed funding and a $54 million Series A round, which recently closed. The investments from Google and Microsoft represent both companies’ first-ever direct investment in an ERW company.
Founded in 2022 at Stanford, Terradot aims to transform the natural process of rock weathering into a global carbon removal solution within the next decade. Terradot has assembled a team of leading scientists, engineers, and operators who are working to solve some of the most important problems in ERW: defining the exact parameters that maximize CO₂ uptake and creating the highest precision measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) tools. Terradot aims to build this research into a suite of tools and a digital platform that will enable ERW to integrate into existing agricultural and industrial systems worldwide – opening a key path to rapid scale within this decade.
Terradot is already running scaled pilot operations in Brazil – one of the world’s most optimal locations for ERW on account of its tropical soils, strength in agriculture, and 93 percent clean electricity matrix. In Brazil, Terradot’s pilot is bringing together industry, government, and academic partners to scale ERW projects across the country, leveraging existing farmland in close proximity to quarries to reduce the complexity and cost of project development and deployment.
To advance this new model for scalable ERW, Terradot has established a collaboration with EMBRAPA, Brazil’s foremost agricultural research institution. Together, Terradot and EMBRAPA Cerrados are developing pilot projects building towards an ERW framework that can scale throughout the country, tapping into its vast agricultural strength and carbon removal potential.
In just over a year of operations in Brazil, Terradot has spread more than 48,000 tons of rock over 1,800 hectares of agricultural land. These trials have generated promising early results, showing that tropical temperature and humidity can improve weathering rates.
In Brazil, the Terradot team is also demonstrating significant progress in developing and proving out MRV approaches for ERW. Building on best-in-class tools to measure weathering in soil cores and soil pore water, Terradot is developing innovative new approaches using reactive transport models, novel geo-statistical approaches, and watershed-level measurements to enable high-quality ERW quantification at scale, The company’s innovative approach will support lower cost removal globally.
Frontier has facilitated purchases on behalf of Frontier founding members Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability as well as Autodesk, H&M Group, Workday, and Salesforce. Also, Aledade, Canva, Match Group, Samsara, SKIMS, Skyscanner, Wise, and Zendesk have purchased via Watershed’s partnership with Frontier.
Terradot was founded by James Kanoff, previously co-founder of The Farmlink Project, one of the fastest growing nonprofits working to address food insecurity; Sasankh Munukutla, who previously published AI for Climate research at Stanford; and Scott Fendorf, a world-renowned Earth System Sciences Professor at Stanford University with over 30 years of soil research experience. They are joined by Julia Marisa Sekula, esteemed Brazilian climate author and ex-banker, and Connor Sendel, climate-tech operator and ex-BCG.
Terradot has assembled a growing team of world-leading scientists with decades of published research (over 100,000 citations) and expertise in related fields, providing unmatched experience to drive advancements in ERW. The founding science team also includes Peter Nico, Senior Scientist and Deputy Director, Energy Geosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; Uli Mayer, Professor, Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia, and Shawn Benner, Terradot Director of Research, formally Professor and Dean, Boise State University.
QUOTES:
“ERW has the potential to remove billions of tons of CO₂ this decade. Realizing that potential demands overcoming major scientific, engineering, and operational challenges within a tight timeline. We founded Terradot to do the improbable: to solve these challenges and transform Earth’s natural processes into a global carbon removal solution.”
James Kanoff, CEO of Terradot
“To unlock enhanced rock weathering as a useful tool for CO2 removal, we need to deploy it at scale and learn how to measure the results rigorously using real-world data. Terradot is well-positioned to do that work in an especially promising geography, and we’re excited to support them to help deliver significant amounts of CO2 removal both for Google’s net zero goal and for the planet.”
Randy Spock, Carbon Credits & Removals Lead for Google
“I’ve known James, the CEO, since long before this company started. These are proven leaders, which is rare to find in an early-stage company. They have the drive, the right technology and a strong focus on execution to succeed. Tom and I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of Terradot’s mission to combat climate change.”
Sheryl Sandberg
“Of all of the companies we’ve considered investing in, Terradot was one of the easiest to get to ‘yes’. The idea is transformative and important, the team is absolutely top-notch, and now our co-investing lineup and initial partner list is as strong as any company we’ve seen at this stage.”
Tom Bernthal
“Terradot aims to deliver customers with cost-effective permanent carbon removal. With pioneers in the field, Terradot’s platform scales the ERW industry’s strongest scientific team to deliver gigatons (ie, billions of tons) of permanent CO₂ removal this decade. Terradot is tackling climate change at the speed and scale it demands. This is the kind of leadership and innovation we need in the fight for our planet’s future.”
John Doerr
Contacts
Scott Coriell / [email protected]