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  • Review Article
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Challenges and opportunities in scaling enhanced weathering for carbon dioxide removal

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 6, pages 672–686 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Terrestrial enhanced weathering (EW) on agricultural lands is a proposed carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technology involving the amendment of soils with crushed base cation-rich rocks, such as basalt. Over a quarter of a billion dollars have been raised by commercial EW start-ups across the globe, accelerating the deployment of EW at scale. In this Review, we outline the scientific knowledge and policy requirements for scaling EW. The global CDR potential of EW is 0.5–2 Gt CO2 year by 2050. Tracking carbon as it is transferred from soils (cradle) to the oceans (grave), fully considering and quantifying lag times in CDR and developing a robust framework of monitoring, reporting and verification of CDR are all important for understanding the performance of EW deployments. Policies aimed at incentivizing responsible deployment and gaining acceptability among directly impacted communities, such as agriculture, are essential to sustainable and long-term growth of EW. High initial prices, the lack of consistent methodology for issuing carbon credits and lifecycle carbon emissions associated with a deployment are the main challenges of scaling EW through the voluntary carbon market. Future research needs to explore the co-deployment of EW and other CDR technologies and utilize long-term (>10 years) instrumented EW field trials to evaluate processes that regulate CDR efficiency and agronomic and economic co-benefits.

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Fig. 1: Overview of enhanced weathering of crushed basalt rock on agricultural lands.
Fig. 2: Downstream processes that affect carbon dioxide removal efficiency.
Fig. 3: The impact of soil cation exchange on the time dynamics of carbon removal.
Fig. 4: The cradle-to-grave framework for tracking carbon flow.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding from the Leverhulme Trust (Leverhulme Research Centre grant RC-2015-029) and UKRI under the UK Greenhouse Gas Removal Programme (BB/V011359/1). N.J.P. acknowledges support from the Yale Centre for Natural Carbon Capture. N.J.P. and C.T.R. acknowledge support from the Grantham Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    David J. Beerling

  2. School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Christopher T. Reinhard

  3. School of Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Rachael H. James

  4. Carbon Removal Standards Initiative, Washington, DC, USA

    Anu Khan

  5. Understanding Risk Research Group, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK

    Nick Pidgeon

  6. Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Noah J. Planavsky

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  1. David J. Beerling
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D.J.B. led the writing with contributions from other authors. All authors contributed to discussion, review and editing of the article.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David J. Beerling.

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Competing interests

D.J.B. has a minority equity stake in companies (Future Forest and Undo) and is an advisory board member of The Carbon Community, a UK carbon removal charity. N.J.P. and C.T.R. were co-founders of the CDR company Lithos Carbon but have no remaining financial ties to the company. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

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Cascade Climate: https://cascadeclimate.org/our-work#erw

CDR.fyi: https://www.cdr.fyi/

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Flux Carbon: https://www.fluxcarbon.earth/

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InPlanet: https://inplanet.earth/

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World Bank: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/e5f6e755-e6a6-4d2c-927a-23b5cc8a9b03

X Prize: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbonremoval

ZeroEx: https://zeroex.com/en

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Beerling, D.J., Reinhard, C.T., James, R.H. et al. Challenges and opportunities in scaling enhanced weathering for carbon dioxide removal. Nat Rev Earth Environ 6, 672–686 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-025-00713-7

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