Milkywire’s Climate Transformation Fund Goes Above and Beyond for Enhanced Weathering

The perennial question surrounding carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is one of funding. Until recently, this had been especially true of enhanced rock weathering (ERW), where unanswered questions surrounding efficacy and scalability stymied all but the most concerted efforts to fund ERW initiatives. Now, despite the field’s relative immaturity, there has been a windfall in investment opportunities for ERW projects and companies. In May 2024, Milkywire selected 13 projects to support, including Flux and Mati Carbon, through their Climate Transformation Fund.

The Climate Transformation Fund is one of five funds in Milkywire’s portfolio. It was established in 2021 as a Beyond Value Chain Mitigation (BVCM) fund, which aims to go above and beyond net-zero targets. The Fund works to create a blueprint for corporate climate support and focuses on achieving scientifically-informed goals, rather than making offset claims. Since its inception, Milkywire has raised more than $14 million, distributing more than $8 million to over 30 projects in 20 countries, attracting investors such as Klarna, Spotify, and ING Group, among others.

Flux and Mati Carbon join Milkywire’s expanding portfolio of ERW companies, which include Silicate Carbon and InPlanet. The inclusion of these ERW companies in the Climate Transformation Fund demonstrates that an increasing amount of capital is being earmarked for ERW companies, attesting to the growing understanding of ERW’s crucial role in CDR.

New kids on the block

Flux, led by Sam Davies, is based in Nairobi, Kenya. They are the first company to start doing ERW in Africa, where potential co-benefits are highest. They are working to unlock that potential to capture carbon and help farmers restore depleted soils by spreading silicate rock powders, such as basalt, onto farmland where it dissolves in rainwater. This process sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which increases soil quality, leading to improved yields, better nutrient uptake, and stronger climate resilience.

Flux is currently conducting a pilot project with smallholder farmers in Kenya while also partnering with large-scale commercial farms and existing rock quarries across the continent for rapid scaling. The data gathered on how ERW works in African soils will help develop rock dust protocols and catalyze ERW projects across the continent.

Flux’s inclusion in Milkywire’s Climate Transformation Fund signifies a huge milestone for the industry as the first carbon credit purchase from ERW on the African continent, acknowledging ERW’s potential to create a scalable, permanent carbon removal solution.

Mati Carbon is a U.S.-based ERW company with a global footprint. Led by Shantanu Agarwal, Mati Carbon is pioneering a unique approach to carbon removal by conducting ERW in rice paddy fields, a project they carry out alongside research into reducing methane emissions from rice paddies.

Mati Carbon is particularly noteworthy for its focus on smallholder farmers in the Global South, as demonstrated by their commitment to maximizing the CDR value transfer to smallholder farmers who show a potential for very high social and environmental co-benefits. They are the first company to deploy ERW at an industrial scale in India, and they have partnered with the Mukuni Trust in Zambia to conduct ERW field trials near the southern border where soil quality is the poorest in the region.

Any system of carbon credits depends on a system of measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) to verify that CO₂ is actually removed from the atmosphere. Mati Carbon takes this issue seriously, using MRV methods developed in collaboration with the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture.

The induction of Flux and Mati Carbon into Milkywire’s Climate Transformation Fund follows a trend of ever-larger funding awarded to ERW companies in recent years. This mirrors XPRIZE Foundation’s recent selection of multiple ERW teams (including Mati Carbon) as finalists in their Carbon Removal competition for a $50 million grand prize to capture and durably store a kiloton of carbon dioxide by 2025.

The Climate Transformation Fund

This year’s new inductees to the Climate Transformation Fund were selected from a pool of more than 1,000 submissions, reflecting Milkywire’s commitment to deploying a wide range of solutions aimed at restoring forests, implementing new energy strategies, developing and deploying new technologies to durably sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, and enact sustainable policy changes.

Milkywire assesses projects based on six categories intended to determine how a project might benefit from funding provided by Milkywire and whether they can achieve their stated goals over short- and long-term timelines through developing and deploying innovative technologies. To minimize harm associated with implementing novel environmental solutions, Milkywire heavily emphasizes risk-mitigation, assessing each project’s environmental and social impact.

Projects that Milkywire supports through the Climate Transformation Fund can be classified into three categories: nature protection and restoration, decarbonization, and carbon dioxide removal.

Nature protection and restoration projects support deploying nature-based climate solutions at scale, based on ecologically and socially sustainable re-greening practices to stop deforestation and protect high conservation value landscapes.

Decarbonization takes a different approach, aiming to produce new large-scale climate policies that can decarbonize various economic sectors. In addition, they are looking to support projects that investigate replacements for fossil fuels.

For the CDR category, Milkywire looks for projects that develop and deploy technical solutions that remove large quantities of CO₂ from the atmosphere and result in a large climate benefit. Milkywire classifies projects within this category into direct air capture (DAC), biomass, and ERW.

They note that while ERW could potentially become a cheap CDR method with low energy needs and promising co-benefits, the science of how best to implement and measure sequestered carbon dioxide is still evolving. The ERW startups selected for the Climate Transformation Fund in 2024 are all working to increase existing understanding of ERW processes – in line with Milkywire’s strategy of supporting projects that focus on developing new technologies.

Tempering expectations

While the efforts of investors and funding platforms are welcome in fuelling the exponential growth that the ERW field has witnessed in the last few years, investors would do well to temper expectations.

Current industry-leading MRV protocols prioritize spreading rock dust for carbon capture rather than remineralization, which also takes into account the agronomic benefits like healthier soils, better pest resistance, higher yields and increased nutrient density. The narrower rock dust protocols recommend repeatedly spreading rock dust at rates far above what most soils need, giving rise to a litany of issues. This emphasis on carbon capture “limits the biological amendments needed to maximize agronomic benefits (for remineralization), which could be detrimental in the long term,” noted Remineralize the Earth (RTE) Board Advisor Tom Vanacore, urging prudence and common sense when applying large quantities of rock dust.

Despite the concerns and unknowns, Milkywire’s Climate Transformation Fund presents an exciting opportunity for the ERW industry. By raising ERW’s profile among investors, the Climate Transformation Fund can help secure the capital needed for essential research efforts to develop a range of ERW products and protocols, and ultimately foster greater confidence in ERW as a critical component in humanity’s quest to achieve net zero emissions.

Benjamin ZH Tan is a recent graduate of Northeastern University with a masters degree in media innovation. He writes about the intersection of business, technology and climate, and is committed to raising public awareness of the science of soil remineralization and emerging technologies in carbon dioxide drawdown. During his down time, he enjoys landscape photography, hiking, and cooking.