Let’s Rock: The Data Quarry Goes Live

In October, alongside leading Enhanced Rock Weathering project developers and carbon removal buyers, we announced a shared vision and plan for unlocking data to accelerate ERW’s scientific progress as a field. We’re thrilled to announce that the Data Quarry is now live—with hard data, many more contributors, and major field momentum towards data transparency.

ERW holds tremendous promise as a durable, scalable carbon removal pathway. However, its impact will only be realized if we can get ‘over the hump’ in our understanding of some of the key dynamics that are driving uncertainty and cost. But this requires more and better data—data that is accessible—to build public confidence in the pathway and enable faster learning about what works. Data sharing requires trust, compliance with data privacy laws and norms, and common infrastructure and schemas.  

That’s what the Data Quarry set out to deliver, and what we are launching today.  

Figure 1: Screenshots of the ERW Data Quarry, once logged in

The Data Quarry is Now Live—with Our First Datasets

Built by Cascade and aligned with leading global data privacy standards and regulations, the Data Quarry offers a secure, permissioned platform for ERW actors to contribute to, access, and learn from real-world data to advance the state of ERW science.

We’re launching the system with three unique and complementary datasets:

• InPlanet has contributed the Data Quarry’s first dataset from a commercial ERW project, using Isometric’s Certify platform. This follows Isometric’s issuance of the world’s first verified ERW credits earlier this year from this project. This is a big step for the ERW field in leveraging the scale and real-world conditions of commercial deployments to drive learning. 

“At InPlanet, we believe the future of ERW hinges on transparency, rigorous science, and collaborative learning. That’s why we’re proud to contribute the first commercial dataset to the Data Quarry. It’s not just about our work, it’s about helping the entire field answer the big questions that matter most.”

— Felix Harteneck, Founder & CEO, InPlanet

• Flux Carbon has shared a dataset focused on the agronomic impacts of ERW, a critical area of learning necessary to demonstrate the value proposition for farmers.
• Carbon Drawdown Initiative, in collaboration with Cascade, has cleaned and collated its XXL Lysimeter data and metadata to make it accessible to any interested researcher. 

We’re so appreciative to our partners for the willingness and work in sharing these datasets and supporting the growing norm of data transparency for the field. You can explore these datasets and request access to them, for non-commercial use, at the ERW Data Quarry, found here.

A Growing Coalition: Now 26 Dataset Commitments and Counting

On top of these early data contributions, we’re proud to share that the Data Quarry community has grown significantly.

Together, this brings the number of datasets in the Data Quarry pipeline to 26, representing a first-of-its-kind resource for the field. 

What’s Next

Because rock takes time to weather, datasets will be uploaded to the system as they become available. To encourage data transparency, all health and safety data, as well as datasets that have been used for peer reviewed articles, will also be made publicly available via CDRXIV. You can sign up for notifications for additional dataset additions to the Data Quarry by joining the Google Group here. 

If you’re a project developer interested in contributing a dataset, or a buyer ready to support transparency in ERW markets, or generally curious about data sharing and how you can get more involved, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or sign up for Cascade’s newsletter here.

At Cascade, we’re committed to advancing ERW science and progress, together.