Dirk Paessler - Thank You Words

Thank you, Patrick, for taking care of us and for running the time. I hope it became visible to everybody listening here and on our stream how intensely and how delicately the scientists we've heard from today look into this. They are really trying to understand it. For me, it was like, "Oh yes, there are more than two new rabbit holes that we can jump into." But I think it's actually necessary to work at this level of detail to create a situation where the rest of the world outside of enhanced rock weathering will actually trust us with this data and everything we've talked about. That's one thing—this is serious work, and that was my message.
Wonderfully, we've had talks that contradicted each other perfectly, which is something we expected to some extent. That's also the reason we have a second day: I want to put you all in one room, shut the door, and as soon as you can explain why you're contradicting each other, I'll let you out again. So that's the job for tomorrow—finding out how these results fit together.
It's now five years ago since we literally spread the first ton of rock on the field, on those circles you've seen, and I still cannot tell whether we've done CDR since then. That drives me nuts. And it's just one field. Can somebody from your group just tell me? Okay—not yet.
So one thing I'd like to see tomorrow is a conversation between all of us about which direction we can go from here, given this understanding. Jens has already shown this very nicely: go deep or go wide. We'll talk about the wide aspects, and I think I can show you some data from the models that Jens just teased a little bit. Our current experiment runs until 2027, so by the end of next year all the pots will have been working for two years. What's the next step after that? What is the carbon drawdown team doing sensibly in 2028? What's promising? Is it another 600 pots, or are we going to the outside? Are we doing something in the lab? I don't know—that's one of the questions I'd like us to talk about tomorrow, so we can have maybe a year to prepare for whatever ideas we come up with.
The next greenhouse experiment, as I said, takes until the end of next year to run. It has five times as many variations as the last one, and it already got a bit blurry here in some moments. But I think this much more diverse data will help us understand even better what's going on—and whether it's better to have more diverse data or not. That's something we'll only find out. Maybe it gets even blurrier afterwards, or maybe it gets clearer. I hope to see you here when we do the next round of this kind of conference, because I think there will again be a lot of exchange necessary to explain to each other why we have contradicting results.
Now, what do I have here? Yeah—I have this slide. First of all, I want to thank Margaret and the events team, and the people from sound and video. Thank you very much for supporting us here. I hope to see you tomorrow so you can support us tomorrow too. Thanks, as Jens already said, to everybody who helped us over time in the greenhouse. There was that first session in January 2023, but since then there have been a couple of rounds of building new pots, and every once in a while new people came in or old people came back to help. We couldn't have done this with just the five or six people that we are. Thank you very much for that. Thank you also to the Hotel Louisa team for keeping us fed and hydrated. And that's about it from my side. Thank you for being here. I hope to see you tomorrow—we'll meet for dinner this evening at seven. Thank you very much. And now, just keep on talking and find out what's going on. Thank you.
[Another speaker]: Oh, before everyone goes, I just wanted to thank Dirk and Ralph especially again for doing all this. It's massive compared to what we've done. And as an aside, I've enjoyed watching your experience in science—going from thinking you'd solve it immediately... So I wanted to give you this. You can hang it in the greenhouse or in your office, but I think it summarizes the journey, in a way. It basically says, "We do this not because it is easy, because we thought it would be easy."
[First speaker]: That's nice. That's nice. We actually thought it was easier.
[Reply]: Yes. Thank you.