Initial Validation of a Soil-Based Mass-Balance Approach for Empirical Monitoring of Enhanced Rock Weathering Rates

Abstract

Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) is a promising scalable and cost-effective carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategy with significant environmental and agronomic co-benefits. A major barrier to large-scale implementation of ERW is a robust monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) framework. To successfully quantify the amount of carbon dioxide removed by ERW, MRV must be accurate, precise, and cost-effective. Here, we outline a mass-balance-based method in which analysis of the chemical composition of soil samples is used to track <i>in situ</i> silicate rock weathering. We show that signal-to-noise issues of <i>in situ</i> soil analysis can be mitigated by using isotope-dilution mass spectrometry to reduce analytical error. We implement a proof-of-concept experiment demonstrating the method in controlled mesocosms. In our experiment, a basalt rock feedstock is added to soil columns containing the cereal crop <i>Sorghum bicolor</i> at a rate equivalent to 50 t ha^-1. Using our approach, we calculate rock weathering corresponding to an average initial CDR value of 1.44 ± 0.27 tCO₂eq ha^-1 from our experiments after 235 days, within error of an independent estimate calculated using conventional elemental budgeting of reaction products. Our method provides a robust time-integrated estimate of initial CDR, to feed into models that track and validate large-scale carbon removal through ERW.