Frontier has facilitated offtake agreements with Terradot, a San Francisco and São Paulo-based carbon removal company. Frontier buyers will pay $27 million to remove 90,000 tons of CO₂ between 2025 and 2029.
Terradot sources basalt from quarries across southern Brazil, transports it to nearby farms where it is spread on farmland to absorb CO₂, and measures how much CO₂ has been removed. The basalt reacts with rainwater, converting atmospheric CO₂ into bicarbonate, which is stored permanently in the ocean. Terradot conducts soil sampling both before and after application to estimate the amount of CO₂ captured. This approach also helps farmers with soil health and pH management.
Terradot’s method of sourcing ground basalt, spreading it, and measuring permanent CO₂ removal.
The case for Terradot
Brazil is an ideal venue for enhanced weathering. The country’s warm, humid climate, and well-drained clay and sandy soils create optimal conditions for accelerated rock weathering. Brazil also benefits from an abundance of basalt quarries located near farms, strong farmer interest in using basalt rock application to improve degraded soils, and government incentives promoting soil restoration.
Terradot’s partnership with the Brazilian government’s principal agricultural research agency (EMBRAPA) creates potential for scale. Joint pilots and research projects with EMBRAPA will give Terradot access to 1+ million hectares of land. This collaboration will also help earn farmers’ trust.
Terradot has a feasible path to near-term, low-cost removal. Terradot projects a 35% decrease in the cost of removal by 2030 driven by a number of efforts: 1) recruitment of farmer partners closer to quarries, reducing feedstock transportation costs, 2) development of new Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) methods that rely on fewer samples, substantially lowering laboratory costs, and 3) deployment of a software platform to optimize spreading and sampling in a way that maximizes removal and minimizes costs.
Despite being a young company, Terradot is showing promising early results. Terradot has only been operating in Brazil since 2023, but has already demonstrated its ability to run scaled-up operations, spreading more than 48,000 tons of rock in its first year over 1,800 hectares of agricultural land. Their recent trials have produced promising results, showing that tropical temperature and humidity can improve weathering rates.
Terradot uses multiple methods to estimate the extent of rock weathering and reaction with CO₂. 1) They use in-field sampling to measure the chemistry of soil solids, water, and gasses, and 2) they are developing monitoring approaches of water chemistry at the mouth of watersheds that deployment farms drain into. This provides a clear understanding of how quickly the basalt dissolves and how much CO₂ is removed as a result and offers a route to cost-effective MRV at scale.
Frontier has facilitated purchases on behalf of Frontier founding members Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability as well as Autodesk, H&M Group, Workday, and Salesforce. Also, Aledade, Canva, Match Group, Samsara, SKIMS, Skyscanner, Wise, and Zendesk have purchased via Watershed's partnership with Frontier. As a follow up to the Frontier-facilitated deal, Google has committed to an additional 200,000-ton purchase from Terradot who will deliver those tons by the early 2030s.
Hannah Bebbington, Head of Deployment at Frontier: “The combination of ideal weather and soil conditions in Brazil, along with Terradot's strategic partnerships, positions them to deliver significant near-term CO₂ removal.”