Portfolio Spotlight: Rock Flour Co. Rock Flour Co. didn’t invent a new element. They just unlocked one that glaciers have been making for millennia.

24 years ago, I made a bet that could have ruined me. It was August 2001. The dot-com crash was in full freefall. Companies were folding left and right.

When rock dust is spread on agricultural land, there are a lot of other things happening additionally to the carbon dioxide removal effect. Some of them are very favorable for the farmers.

Everybody in the biochar field, please listen up: This project needs your support! Biochar, the only currently scalable Carbon Removal method, needs your help!

I’ve told my teams this for decades: Be frugal with everything, except the tools that shape your output. You don’t need to spend money for prestige, but you should spend money where it counts.

The world’s largest EW greenhouse experiment just produced a scientific treasure: 1,000+ soil & biomass samples. Since 2023, we’ve been running 400 pot experiments near Fürth, Germany, testing 16 soils and 12 feedstocks with lolium perenne.

For enhanced weathering, the general rule of thumb is that smaller grains should weather faster. But a rock dust with a smaller grain size does not automatically have a higher weathering rate!

Decarbonizing agriculture is happening today, in Thailand, thanks to Happy Ground. What began as a venture, founded by Pearl Pattamaphon Dumnui and Moh Suthasiny, linking farmers to urban consumers has grown into a climate-tech company tackling Scope 3 emissions with:

Der Faktencheck zum Thema Windräder: 6 Gründe gegen Windkraft die keine sind. Wieder ein frisches und kompetentes Erklär-Video auf Patrick Niedermayer‘s Youtube Kanal. youtu.be/WHBNZWZGyRY

Where can you buy 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘣𝘰𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴 online, without endless sales calls and wire transfers? We searched for a directory, but we couldn’t find one. Instead, we built one: cdr-shops.com.

Weiterhin zeigen die COVID-Hospitalisierungen der ZNAs der @dgina.bsky.social Notaufnahme Ampel keinen Anstieg an (ähnlich wie die ITS Zahlen, inkl. "Delle" im Juli), während die Infektionszahlen zu steigen scheinen (siehe Daten von @rv-enigma.bsky.social unten).

Could we do enhanced weathering in the Sahara instead of on agricultural land? No! There are three main reasons why we can not just spread tremendous amounts of rock dust in deserts to generate CDR using EW:

How should I know what I think before I read what I write? How do you find what YOUR thoughts are, you know, those shy voices of your own which are often drowned out by daily noise, news, problems? When in doubt, write!

"The score takes care of itself." This is the title of a book by Bill Walsh, one of America's most successful football coaches, and it's one of my guiding principles for everything I build. Success isn't about chasing the score, but rather doing the hard work that makes good outcomes inevitable.

Die Entwicklung der COVID-Hospitalisierungen, die die ZNAs der @dgina.bsky.social Notaufnahmeampel melden, geht eher seitwärts seit April als dass sie ansteigt. Ähnlich wie @rv-enigma.bsky.social es in den ITS Daten zeigt. Die verfügbaren Daten zu Infektionen zeigen aber Anstieg. 1/2

When looking for a good region or location for EW projects, one needs to take several aspects into consideration:

Just ask! One cold email changed everything for me. More than once! Back in 1998, in the early months of Paessler, there was no LinkedIn or social media. All I had was email and my own curiosity.

Buying an Apple Watch was the single most effective step to improve my life with LongCOVID. Here is how I learned to properly “pace” with it.

We just learned a €50,000 lesson about European bureaucracy versus climate science. For our upcoming greenhouse experiments (600-700 pots!), we wanted to test enhanced weathering on tropical soils, where CDR happens fastest.

In der "Visions for Climate" Vorlesungsreihe über die Klimakrise platzt dem renommierten Klimawissenschaftler Harald Lesch der Kragen. Denn die Klimawissenschaft ist sich einig: der Klimawandel ist menschengemacht.

Weeks, months or even years after the rock dust has been spread on a field, we want to know how much CDR we have actually achieved. How many tons of carbon dioxide were removed from the atmosphere?

„Die meisten Menschen mit Long COVID sind ihre eigenen Ärzte“ „Wir haben festgestellt, dass Menschen mit Long Covid oft dazu gezwungen sind, sich in einem System zurechtzufinden, das nicht ausreichend über ihren Zustand informiert ist und ihnen keine angemessene medizinische …

Over a time of 4 months, we went through 50+ emails trying to buy 200 tons of durable CDR for ourselves. Here's what we learned about the broken carbon removal market:

Mein Abschätzung der COVID Inzidenz in DE basierend auf den Hospitalisierungen in den ZNAs der @DGINA_eV Notaufnahme Ampel liegt etwas unter den Werten, die @rv-enigma.bsky.social aktuell berechnet. Unsere beiden Werte liegen dabei deutlich unter drei Vorjahren.

What if two carbon signals told 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 stories? That’s exactly what we found in our latest greenhouse experiment on enhanced weathering (EW).

Empfehlenswerter Vortrag „Nikotinpflaster-Therapie bei #LongCOVID - Mechanismen, Zusammenhänge und Praxisanwendung" von Dr. Marco Leitzke @TheNicotineTest www.youtube.com/live/E0Yb6FL...

Your Weekly Dose of Rock Solid EW Knowledge! For enhanced weathering projects, common amounts of rock spread on the fields are between 5 and 20 tons per hectare. Some in-field experiments even go up to 40 or 50 tons per hectare.

Patrick hat zwei tolle Sachen gemacht: 1. Sein (altes) Reiheneckhaus ist jetzt vollständig unabhängig von fossiler Energie (nahezu ohne Mehrkosten!) und 2. er hat ein superinformatives Video über diese Umstellung produziert. Lerne in nur 11 Minuten... www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG3_...

Biological pest control in our greenhouse: We have brought an army of lady bug larvae and lacewing larvae (in the photo) into the greenhouse to hunt lice and other bugs that feed from the grass and clover plants in our experiments. And they are everywhere!

“The next generation is doomed.” That’s what older folks always say, right? They said it about my generation, too. Now, at 56, I hear similar things from my peers: complaints about TikTok culture, influencer nonsense, or a perceived lack of seriousness among younger people.

After the rock is crushed and milled, it needs to be transported to the field. As long as this transport is not solely powered by regenerative energy, which will remain the case for some time, the distances are limited that we can drive rock around in trucks while still creating a negative emission.

Die COVID-Inzidenz-Abschätzung aus den Hospitalisierungsdaten der @DGINA_eV Notaufnahme Ampel zeigt sehr ähnliche Werte (schwankend um 200) wie es @rv_enigma aus anderen Daten abschätzt. Damit liegen wir z.Zt. besser als in beiden Vorgängerjahren.

In the Netherlands, 232 patients with long COVID received hyperbaric oxygen therapy. After 3 months, 56–63% reported better mental or physical health, but 13–19% worsened. Cognitive symptoms showed the most improvement. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In May, @climeworks.bsky.social launched 𝘔𝘢𝘮𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘩, the world’s largest DAC+storage plant. But this milestone is just one part of a bigger story.

It all starts with the rock (or, sometimes, with industrial residues). Suitable rocks like basalt, lime or dunite are mined and get crushed down to grain sizes of a few hundred microns.

From the beginning we intended to share all our data from our ERW experiments! Now there is a dedicated website for this, the Cascade Data Quarry! This will become a cornucopia for EW scientists!

No solution is already perfect during development. All great solutions initially started as somewhat flawed solutions, then improved later. But you need to start somewhere!

The plants on the first approx. 450 pots of our new 2025/2026 Carbon Drawdown Initiative greenhouse experiment for enhanced weathering have had a good start. Even more pots are coming soon... This week we have taken and measured the first set of leachate water samples. #projectcarbdown

A 48-hour flask test that predicts 700-day carbon removal outcomes? Sounds too good to be true, but in our lab, it’s working. In our 2023/24 greenhouse study, we tested 400 rock-soil combos for enhanced weathering. Some worked brilliantly. Others completely flopped.

The first product of what would become my 500-person software company 20 years later was only possible due to being a playful overtime student.

Make CDR happen! Period.

Was würde Captain Picard machen, wenn er mit der Enterprise heute erstmals die Erde entdecken würde? Dirk: „Er würde die Prime Directive befolgen“ Jörn: „Wahrscheinlich, ja. Weil sich der Planet, oder die Bewohner des Planeten, selber in die Scheiße geritten haben.“ 1/2

"I’m very introverted. I don’t get energy from socializing." That’s Jon Stewart, in conversation with Trevor Noah. To which Noah responds: “𝘖𝘩 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘩, 𝘐’𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦.” This moment really struck me. Here are two hyper-visible, high-impact people talking openly about being introverts.

To be honest, measuring enhanced weathering in the field is way harder than we expected 4 years ago, when we set up our first field experiment in April 2021.

Hat #Sporttauchen eine ähnliche Wirkung bei #LongCOVID wie HBOT (Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy)? Ich habe im Urlaub für 10 Tage je einen Tauchgang mit EnrichedAir/Nitrox (32% Sauerstoff) gemacht und... 1/11

. @brunncy.bsky.social in the *excellent* documentary about the state of the CDR industry from NZZ: „If we as society want to become climate neutral then there must be a new global industry sector for CO2 removal“. It will be a long, rocky journey, but it needs to be done.

@thesicktimes.bsky.social does fantastic journalism on the long COVID crisis. They're running their summer donation drive and it's being matched 😉 the-sick-times.fundjournalism.org/donate/

Der aktuelle Gesamtüberblick mit Hospitalisierungen, Inzidenz und Fallzahlen sieht aktuell so aus (die Daten der aktuellen Woche sind natürlich noch unvollständig!):

Portfolio Spotlight: Co-reactive. Can we use CO₂ to build our cities? Co-reactive thinks so, and they’re proving it. Their new reactor technology turns captured CO₂ into a high-performance cement substitute.

Carbon Dioxide Removal will likely become one of the most traded commodities on the planet. Most of the top commodities we are currently trading across borders every year are one order of magnitude below the amount of carbon that the IPCC says we should remove annually by 2050.