Portfolio Spotlight: Tropicarbon
This series highlights the many companies Carbon Drawdown Initiative has invested in.
Transforming Agriculture
It started with the realization that Colombia has a lot of potential for climate projects. Ludwig Ritter, together with Wilson Escobar and Professor Camilo Montes, co-founded Tropicarbon to exploit the fact that this region of the world holds several key aspects optimal for enhanced weathering projects: a fitting climate, the necessary rocks, and agricultural work that can benefit from EW even without glancing at CDR certificates in the first place.
As we work to combat climate change, developing new science presents only one side of the equation. For meaningful carbon drawdown to occur, the solutions must be financially sustainable. As long as it costs more to capture and store carbon emissions than to reduce them, drawdown will never gain enough traction for us to reach carbon neutrality.
Tropicarbon decided to tackle agriculture, an industry with some of the highest CO2 emissions. The goal? To transform the industry from a carbon producer into a “carbon sink,” absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere than the industry produces. How? Enhanced weathering (EW).
Why Enhanced Weathering?
While many methods of carbon capture and storage have been suggested, EW provides a nearly all-in-one solution. By spreading rock dust across fields, rainwater—containing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—creates carbonates, which enter the groundwater and wash to the oceans.
Unlike some carbon capture options, weathering is entirely natural. Rainwater already brings carbon dioxide to the ground, and some of it already gets stored in the rock soil and ends up in the ocean. Enhanced weathering seeks to speed up the process so it can be utilized at a meaningful scale.
It’s also a permanent storage solution, since carbon trapped during EW remains in the ocean. There’s no need to figure out how to move or recycle the collected carbon, and the solution doesn’t “kick the can down the road” and leave a problem for future generations to solve.
Built in Colombia
Tropicarbon currently operates exclusively in Colombia, which presents several strategic advantages:
Optimal Climate: The tropical climate in Colombia accelerates rock weathering, making it an efficient region for EW.
Abundant resources: The geological diversity of the country provides ample supplies of silicate rocks, ideal for EW, with minimal transportation distances (which reduces overall emissions output).
Agricultural potential: Colombia’s acidic soils are ideal for EW applications as they benefit both the soil and farmers.
Current projects include multiple greenhouse and field-scale setups in diverse regions, such as Córdoba and Barranquilla. The projects test various rock blends and the potential impact on rock weathering rates, agronomic parameters (crop yield, soil pH, nutrient retention, etc.), and heavy metal stabilization using plant-based buffers.
The team at Tropicarbon have developed and tested unique monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) technology to quantify the results of the projects and establish CDR rates in remote locations. The proprietary MRV technology focuses on the aqueous phase, ensuring a precise, reliable measure of carbon capture in line with requirements for carbon credit certifiers. The unique climate of Colombia allowed the team to validate their MRV technology in several field-scale projects, greatly improving the transparency and accountability in EW as a growing industry.
That’s the bigger picture—to make EW a recognized viable option for carbon capture and storage with real-life data.
Two Test Cases
The field projects in Córdoba provide insight on the effects of different rock amendments on corn yields. The graph below illustrates the ton-per-hectare yield results for three different test treatments: 100 percent basalt, agricultural lime, and Tropicarbon’s proprietary rock blend, relative to a control field.
Based on early findings, Tropicarbon’s rock blend achieved the highest yield, up to a 10 percent increase. Agricultural lime improved yields over the control, but with lower results than the rock blend. Surprisingly, basalt had a negative impact relative to the control test.
Given the early stage of data collections, comparisons for EW potential around the globe cannot be drawn yet. The findings validate, however, the potential of optimized rock blends enhancing crop productivity in Colombia while removing meaningful amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
As a general principle, this suggests the value of customised rock blends should carry to other climates. Each unique climate will require different blends to achieve maximum benefits, and Tropicarbon’s methods can provide a repeatable framework to develop those blends.
The project in Barranquilla, in collaboration with the Universidad del Norte, represents the largest multi-soil experiment on EW in Latin America. The experiments study soil samples from many locations in Colombia to map their potential for EW. The broader objective is to better predict weathering rates to help reduce uncertainties in carbon credit generation.
Big Challenges Require Ambitious Goals
Addressing climate change is one of humanity's most urgent challenges, as its impacts threaten the well-being of current and future generations. Thankfully, so many talented people see solutions to the problems. Building the solutions requires ambitious goal setting. Looking ahead, Tropicarbon aims to:
Remove 1 million tons of CO2 by 2030
Lead the scientific community in understanding ERW in tropical climates
Remove the intransparency around ERW for agricultural operators to support farmers with better yields and lower costs
Scale MRV technology while maintaining remote-friendliness and ease of use to help establish a global ERW standard quantification for carbon removal
Bridging the gap between environmental science and practical application, Tropicarbon is supporting disadvantaged local farming communities and building a future where economic growth and environmental sustainability go hand in hand.
