Interview With Everest Carbon Founder Pascal Michel – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 10th February 2025, 01:19 pm

Q: How would you describe the state of enhanced rock weathering (ERW) in carbon removal, and where it’s heading?

ERW is at an inflection point today. The first credits were issued around a month ago, signaling that the we are nearing consensus around the science that allows the industry to scale. Measurement, however, remains a challenge, and it was very tedious, hard and expensive work to get those first certified credits off the ground. The industry is lacking a scalable solution for generating proof of carbon capture in the field that does not significantly rely on geochemical models that currently still lack proper calibration and validation. We hope that that our sensor can fill this gap and truly unlock ERW’s potential.

Q: What was it that first made you interested in carbon removal, and when?

As a trained physicist, I come from a deeply technical and scientific background and left academia to become a founder as I wanted to create a real impact at scale. The climate crisis is one of the biggest challenges that society is facing today, and carbon removal stood out to me because it was both such a massive and necessary challenge to tackle and completely unsolved at scale when I started. My “aha” moment was seeing the delta between the vast theoretical potential of ERW and the practical reality of deploying it. The missing piece was and is a scalable, affordable measurement that proves carbon removal, and that’s what led me to build Everest.

Q: You work across different locations in the world — what are the pros and cons you’re seeing?

A global hybrid model has large benefits when you’re solving a problem with multiple dimensions—we need stellar science, hardware and software coming together for our product and different hubs around the world offer different unique features there. Simply put, the upside is that we can tap into multiple of the worlds strongest talent hubs where it makes sense. The challenge is time zones and logistics, but those are solvable.

Q: What are you currently working on in terms of carbon removal, and how can readers best understand the service your company provides?

Everest has built the first live sensor to directly measure and verify carbon removals through ERW in fields. Our technology measures the additional stored CO2 as it flows out of the field dissolved in water, providing our customers with continuous, in-place verification for their projects. The problem with measurement today is that it’s manual labor intensive and prohibitively expensive if you want great continuous leachate water data. We solve that with the first fully digitized, hands-off and affordable sensor that is able to generate unseen data at scale.

Q: Where do you hope, and where do you think, the carbon removal industry and specifically ERW is in 3 years?

In three years, I expect ERW to be a core pathway in carbon markets, with a robust monitoring infrastructure that makes credits bankable and unlocks mainstream corporate as well as governmental demand. My hope is that this leads to a widespread global adoption in agriculture, turning farmers into the frontline heros of our fight against climate change.

Q: How do you differentiate between the different kinds of ERW approaches, and where do the evolutionary steps lie in each?

ERW varies across several key factors — rock type, soil properties, climate, and the crops grown on-site. Basalt is the most widely used rock due to its global availability and strong nutrient co-benefits for agriculture. Rock selection is critical for a successful project, and over time, it’s become clear that high relative surface area, high removal capacity, and short transport distances from quarry to field are essential for cost-effective deployment. Climate plays a major role, particularly rainfall. No water, no weathering reaction — so regions with consistent rainfall year-round are ideal. Our understanding of the importance of soil properties has probably advanced the most in recent years. Data shows that soil pH, texture, cation exchange capacity, and organic matter all influence the speed of weathering a lot. Project locations are adapting to these insights, where highly weathered tropical soils standing out as geologically optimal, although people find promising ERW sites in temperate climates as well.

I can recommend checking out the work of the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, which has done extensive greenhouse trials on these factors and transparently published their results and data. This was really helpful for the whole space to learn and understand how important those factors are. 

Q: Where do you think are overlooked opportunities in terms of cleantech and climate?

Climate tech often focuses narrowly on climate or carbon outcomes, yet often doesn’t fundamentally improve the bottom line for people or businesses. That’s a key reason why many solutions struggle to scale—if they don’t drive economic value, adoption remains limited. ERW presents a great example of how it can be done better. Studies have shown that basalt application can routinely increase crop yields by 10-20% and even more in highly weathered or nutrient-poor soils. So the overall value proposition is positioned as agronomic update, one that boosts yields, lowers fertilizer costs, and builds long-term soil health while removing carbon. This directly ties to profitability of the farmers that will drive adoption to large scale. Climate solutions that pay for themselves scale orders of magnitude faster than those relying on subsidies or policy mandates. That’s where the biggest opportunities lie—climate tech that generates clear, immediate financial wins for adopters.

Q: If you had one wish for a climate policy, what would it be?

A global mandatory carbon tax with durability guarantees. Let us be honest to ourselves and price in the damage we’re doing to our planet and society. Fix that, and deployment moves orders of magnitude faster both in decarbonization and carbon removal. The revenues generated from such a tax could then be redistributed to the whole population and particularly to people who are most affected by the negative effects of climate change, which would be vital to soften the blow to livelihoods as the century evolves.