Enhanced Rock Weathering: A Scalable Approach to Carbon Dioxide Removal

by Dr Will Turner

Tuesday 2 Dec 2025, 12:00 → 13:30 Europe/London

OLL/3-337 (Liverpool Physics)

The challenge of mitigating climate change is not only one of reducing emissions but also of removing vast quantities of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. Current projections suggest that to meet global temperature targets, we must remove billions of tonnes of CO₂ each year by mid-century, a scale that no existing technology can yet achieve.

Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) is an approach that accelerates a natural process: the chemical reaction between silicate minerals and CO2 in rainwater and soils, forming stable bicarbonates that ultimately store carbon in the ocean. This talk will introduce the scientific principles of ERW, its potential to deliver large scale, durable carbon removal, and the challenges involved in verifying it at operational scales.

Drawing on recent field work and large-scale monitoring campaigns, I’ll discuss how advances in geochemistry, data engineering/analysis, and modelling can make ERW both measurable and scalable. The talk will explore how constraining key environmental variables - soil type, climate, and rock mineralogy - enables robust carbon accounting across millions of hectares of farmland, turning what is effectively “applied geochemistry” into a practical climate solution.

 

Zoom link
https://liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/94024479009?pwd=nuzNDxizKFlBCJIdaJKaKldsWAYyvg.1