In 1st trial of its kind in the US, Irish startup spreads concrete dust on Illinois farm field to remove CO2 from the air

Over the course of millions of years, the earth regularly removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through a natural process called weathering, when exposure to the elements wears down surface rocks and silicate minerals.

But at the rate humans have been producing and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, this process that happens on a geological time scale just isn’t fast enough to keep up.

A corn and soybean farm in the village of Buckingham, Illinois, 60 miles south of Chicago, is providing the testing grounds for an Irish startup attempting to “enhance” weathering, thus shortening the process from millenniums to decades.

The Illinois trial, the first of its kind in the United States, is one of many efforts to leverage the potential of different materials to combat global warming.

“The whole carbon removal concept exists because we have to backtrack — we’ve gone too far,” said Maurice Bryson, founder and CEO of Irish startup Silicate. “The idea of this solution is, we’re using what’s already there.”

Last week, Silicate began covering over 100 acres of farmland with 500 to 1,000 tons of fine dust from ready-mix concrete that has been returned. Researchers at the climate tech company hope the concrete dust can permanently remove up to 220 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transfer it to the soil over the course of a year, the equivalent of CO2 emissions from almost 50 cars in one year.

Carbon dioxide removal is a technique by whichcarbon that is already in the atmosphereis removed through processes like enhanced weathering, reforestation and direct air capture,which uses engineered mechanical or chemical systems to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. a California startup was the first to commercially market direct air capture in the United States.