COMPANY
Carbon Drawdown Initiative
INDUSTRY
Energy & Utilities
COMPANY SIZE
Small and mid-sized installation
COUNTRY
Germany
SCALE
4 fields in Europe, hundreds of buried sensors, LoRaWAN
The Carbon Drawdown Initiative is a German research organization focused on negative emissions: removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it long-term. Its flagship Project Carbdown spreads ground basalt and olivine rock on arable fields, where the rock flour reacts with CO₂ in the soil. Natural weathering takes thousands of years; the project explores methods to accelerate this at agricultural scale.
To prove a field is sequestering carbon and to issue CO₂ removal certificates to farmers, precise and continuous monitoring across many fields is required. Manual laboratory methods cannot scale.
PRTG Hosted Monitor collects data every twenty minutes from hundreds of sensors buried across four European field sites. Middleware decodes LoRaWAN data streams and forwards them to PRTG. Soil and weather readings are consolidated in one dashboard: pH value, conductivity, moisture, temperature, precipitation, wind speed, solar radiation, and air pressure.
Data can be exported at any time, including full historical records, for analysis alongside laboratory results.
PRTG Hosted Monitor was chosen because the other measuring systems are cloud-based, making integration seamless. Approximately 40,000 data points are collected each day. Automated monitoring is the only viable path to scaling the project across hundreds or thousands of fields in the future.
PRTG Hosted Monitor provides us with a good overview of the reactions and products of those reactions in the soil by displaying soil and weather data from connected sensors. It also incorporates data transmitted from other measuring systems and laboratory data. Initial learnings have already been derived from this data pool: The biggest challenge in measuring weathering – which can easily be done in a laboratory – is the high variability of natural and environmental influences in an outdoor area.
