Yale University
Project participants will use basalt dust instead of agricultural lime to increase soil pH through a method known as Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW), which speeds up a natural carbon sequestration process.
Farm Eligibility
Aug-23
AL, AR, CA, CO, CT, DE, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KY, KS, LA, MA, ME, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, VT, VA, WA, WV, WI, WY
Amending Soil Properties with Lime
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Money Matters
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Farmers will receive compensation to enroll in ERW trials at $50 per acre of land in test plots annually for farms 40 acres or larger. Farms smaller than 40 acres will receive a base payment of $2,000. All material, application, and monitoring costs will be supplied for farmers, which will equate to $550 per acre of in-kind funding due to reductions in input costs participating farmers would otherwise be required to expend.
Refer to program category descriptions for general stackability potential. Reach out to the program contact for more information.
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Contracting Info
The Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities program is a five year program starting in February 2023.
All projects are required to include plans to (1) quantify greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits and (2) monitor/verify those benefits over time.
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Alongside the regional organizations that will provide technical assistance to their producers, an independent technical assistant (the project manager based at the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture) as well as a consultant will be hired to support farmers during the planting and harvesting seasons, and as they set up test plots, take soil samples, and monitor crop yields. While these tasks are designed to be easy for a farmer to navigate, this support will be used to ensure rigorous scientific data as well as support growers during the initial implementation. All enrolled farmers will also directly consult with PI Planaysky and/or Co-PIs Raymond or Reinhard about ERW and their monitoring plans.
Technical Info
Yale University
Yale has developed a simple, robust, and cost-effective approach toward capture attribution for ERW in agricultural systems based on measuring the abundance of trace and major elements in a bulk soil sample. This method is described in detail in the paper A new soil-based approach for empirical monitoring of enhanced rock weathering rate (Reershemius, T, and Kelland, ME, in review). A preprint of the paper which expands on methodologies described in this section is available here: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.05004
To ensure a robust estimate of the actual amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, the empirically estimated CO2 will be used in the SCEPTER model and another global biogeochemical model (CGENIE) to link initial CO2 capture to longer term CO2 removal from the soil system (and removal over a specific time frame) (Kanzaki et al., 2022). As a long-term goal, as these (and other similar) models improve over time, the community can transition to a more cost-effective, widely agreed means of measuring CDR by relying on modeling.
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