Progress, open questions, and what comes next.
Last week we hosted the Carbon Drawdown Symposium in Erlangen, built around data from our greenhouse experiment. The goal was simple: share what we’ve learned, stress-test our hypotheses, and move the science forward together.
It worked. Here’s what I took away.
Four years in
Back in 2021, I expected (rather naively) meaningful measurement results within the first year. That didn’t happen. What followed was a long process of trying to understand what actually occurs in rock-dust-applied soil and how difficult it is to measure.
Standing in front of the room giving the welcome address, I felt less frustrated about that than I expected. The naivety of year one didn’t slow us down – it got us started. The open questions feel like evidence of progress now, not failure.
Three observations
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The people drawn to this work are good people. Everyone in the room was collaborative, constructive, and motivated by the problem rather than personal credit. Two days with that group was genuinely energizing.
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New data produced new questions. From the greenhouse results, we collectively developed better explanations for the mechanisms at play. And in doing so, it felt like each answer surfaced three new follow-up questions that will need further investigation. I now accept this is just what science looks like up close.
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The field is getting better at predicting where ERW works. Which rock types, which soil conditions, which geographies. The discrimination is improving. That matters enormously for where new projects should – and shouldn’t – be launched.
What comes next
We’ll reconvene once the second greenhouse experiment yields new samples. Another year or two away, most likely.
Session recordings from the Symposium are now available on Youtube and on our event website (which also hosts the slides as PDFs).
Thank you to everyone who came to Erlangen and those who joined online. You made two days of science genuinely enjoyable.
PS: Here is the recording of the intro session
- Source: https://www.carbon-drawdown.de/blog/2026-6-23-three-observations-from-the-carbon-drawdown-symposium
