Raising the Bar for Durable Carbon Removal

Terradot's Sentinel site in Brazil.

ERW: A Natural Process, Accelerated in Brazil

For billions of years, silicate rocks have helped regulate Earth’s climate by capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere and locking it away in soils and oceans. Terradot accelerates this natural process by spreading finely milled basalt on farmland, where it reacts with rain and soil to remove CO₂ from the air–turning a slow geologic cycle into a practical climate solution.

Brazil offers ideal conditions for ERW: a favorable climate, abundant renewable energy to power operations, and extensive quarry networks that make basalt supply accessible. Over the past year, Terradot has scaled deployment, applying more than 100,000 tonnes of basalt across 4,500 hectares and collecting over 100,000 soil samples across the project area—roughly the size of Manhattan. Our goal is not only to deliver carbon removal, but also to integrate seamlessly with farm operations and provide tangible agronomic benefits to farmers.

Microsoft’s Role in Scaling ERW

Beyond a standard offtake agreement, Microsoft’s support goes deeper–backing Terradot’s measurement-first approach and enabling the field trials, lab work, and data infrastructure that underpin our platform. By bringing not just capital but also technical expertise, Microsoft is helping move ERW from promise to practice while ensuring scientific integrity.

That commitment has enabled us to establish Sentinel, where commercial deployment and advanced monitoring come together to validate ERW under real-world farming and watershed conditions. The site is delivering commercial carbon removal, while ongoing research pushes the field further–probing how ERW operates from soil to aquifer to stream. This above-and-beyond science, which exceeds current certification requirements, strengthens confidence in durable removal by validating our models, reducing uncertainty about how carbon moves at the watershed scale, and enhancing the data that guide future deployments.

A Terradot field scientist performs routine water monitoring. (Credit: Bryan Stefano Leite)

Sentinel: Building Confidence from Soil to Stream

A Terradot field scientist performs routine water monitoring. At Sentinel, Terradot is building one of the most comprehensive monitoring networks yet for a commercial ERW site. Set on sweeping farmland in São Paulo state, the site sits within a single watershed. Here, rain falls on basalt-amended fields, dissolving minerals that capture CO₂ as bicarbonate. That water filters through soils into the aquifer and later re-emerges in a tree-lined stream before joining a larger river system. Because carbon storage in ERW is carried primarily in dissolved form, this natural topography creates a living laboratory, allowing us to track every stage of the water cycle–from soil to aquifer to stream–and measure how much carbon is retained along the way.

What makes Sentinel distinct is a novel monitoring network–deep groundwater wells, in-situ soil sensors, and surface-water stations–all built to constrain the biggest uncertainties in ERW and close the loop on the full carbon pathway. With Microsoft’s support, we’ve also drilled soil and sediment cores all the way to bedrock, characterizing the mineralogy and chemistry of the full soil profile. Within this framework, our research is focused on three critical areas:

• Agricultural interactions: Testing how tillage, fertilizer use, and crop rotations affect ERW, using replicated plots and higher-resolution soil pore-water data.

• Carbon in deep soil & aquifers: Extending monitoring below the root zone to determine how dissolved inorganic carbon transports and transforms on the pathway to the stream.

• Degassing at springs & streams: Measuring what happens when carbon-enriched groundwater resurfaces, including degassing and associated chemical changes influences the fate of stored carbon

Together, these efforts move us beyond shallow soil measurements toward a fuller picture of the carbon balance. That deeper perspective allows Sentinel to transform open questions into evidence that strengthens and scales ERW. While our crediting already takes a conservative approach, the insights we’re building enable us to further optimize deployments, minimize potential losses, and prioritize sites that maximize removal efficiency.

Today, our projects are being designed to meet full third-party registry standards, but registry compliance alone isn’t enough. ERW is still a young field, and buyers need confidence that credits will hold up over time. Sentinel was designed to provide that confidence–probing how carbon behaves not just in fields but also in aquifers and streams–so that every credit rests on stronger evidence. This commitment allows us to deliver responsibly today while building the foundation for reliable scale tomorrow.

A Terradot spreader distributes basalt rock powder to farmland. (Credit: Bryan Stefano Leite)

Looking Ahead: Towards Infrastructure-Grade Carbon Removal

As Sentinel focuses on advancing measurement and monitoring to build confidence in ERW, our projects elsewhere are already delivering in the near-term. Project Carcará, located in Paraná state just south of São Paulo, has already been validated under Isometric’s Enhanced Weathering in Agriculture protocol, with first verified credits expected in Q4 2025. Together, these milestones chart a clear path forward: verified projects that show ERW can deliver durable credits today, and research that optimizes deployments, reduces uncertainty, and unlocks greater scale tomorrow.

Terradot’s journey began with pioneering science, and that foundation remains at our core. But scaling reliably is the next critical challenge for carbon removal. That’s why we’re laying the groundwork for infrastructure-grade deployment–strengthening our team and operational discipline to deliver projects at increasing scale, while plugging into existing agricultural and infrastructure networks and partnering with the businesses that already anchor these regions. Sentinel offers a glimpse of how that journey will unfold, bringing together rigorous monitoring and real-world farming to set the stage for ERW to become a reliable pillar of global carbon removal.

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Terradot is building the foundation for ERW to become a pillar of climate action. Our mission is clear: harness and scale Earth’s natural processes in the fight for a livable planet.