Carbon Drawdown Initiative Innovates On A Lab Test Speeding Up CDR Research - CleanTechnica

The article from CleanTechnica highlights a significant advancement by the Carbon Drawdown team in accelerating research on enhanced rock weathering (EW), a promising carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technique. Traditionally, testing the effectiveness of different rock-soil combinations in field and greenhouse settings has been slow and costly, often taking 200 to 250 days or more to determine if a given pairing increases soil alkalinity—a key indicator of carbon removal. This lengthy process hampers the ability to quickly identify effective combinations and avoid unproductive efforts. The breakthrough comes in the form of a simple laboratory “shaker test” that compresses the evaluation time to just 48 hours. By mixing small amounts of rock, soil, and distilled water in a flask and measuring electrical conductivity (EC) as a proxy for alkalinity changes, researchers found that short-term lab results closely matched long-term greenhouse outcomes. This rapid test could enable project developers to pre-screen rock-soil pairs efficiently, reducing wasted time, money, and emissions