The IoT company provides part of the measurement infrastructure for a climate protection project: sensors from Dragino, Milesight and Barani Design as well as gateways from Kerlink. The devices and further hardware for the LoRaWAN IoT can be seen at stand 5-320.
Alpha-Omega Technology GmbH is an expert in IoT infrastructures and, with iot-shop.de, runs the largest online shop for LPWAN products in the German-speaking region. With its many years of expertise, the company supports the climate protection project "Project Carbdown" of the Carbon Drawdown Initiative. The aim is a low-cost method that allows farmers to sell carbon removal certificates for capturing CO₂ on arable land. In a partnership between science and industry, the project investigates how CO₂ can be captured from the air using rock dust on arable land.
Solutions for removing carbon dioxide are urgently needed: without rapid and drastic steps, the planet faces devastating warming, warned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in April this year. The average temperature will continue to rise as long as the share of CO₂ in the atmosphere increases. Greenhouse gas emissions must be stopped, but carbon dioxide that is already present must also be filtered out of the air and the sea. There are various methods for generating negative emissions. One of them is enhanced weathering, and this is the method "Project Carbdown" relies on.
Accelerating a natural removal process
Basalt, an established fertiliser, reacts with CO₂ from the air as it weathers. Each tonne binds around 0.3 tonnes of CO₂. Harmless carbonates are formed that bind the CO₂ for a very long time and thus remove it from the atmosphere permanently. This process has been running everywhere on Earth for billions of years. The natural process can be accelerated by grinding the rock finely to increase its surface area and spreading it on biologically active agricultural land. This could make a substantial contribution to Germany's climate neutrality by 2050. What is still missing are concrete measurements of the timing of the removal process on arable land. In the laboratory, the CO₂ uptake can already be measured. On the test fields, the project team is now looking for a simpler method of measuring the CO₂ capture rate that does not require elaborate laboratory technology. For this purpose, several hundred scientific instruments have been buried, which regularly take water samples for the laboratory and record various measured values electronically.
LoRaWAN sensors measure underground
Alpha-Omega Technology provides part of the technical infrastructure for the measurements and advises the project team free of charge. Sensors from the manufacturers Dragino and Milesight are used to determine soil moisture, temperature, conductivity and pH and to record further environmental parameters. The LoRaWAN packets are received via gateways from the manufacturer Kerlink. The sensor probes are buried, and the radio module, connected by a rugged cable, sends the data from above ground. The sensors stand out for their sturdy outdoor housing, battery life of several years and high reliability at an affordable price of under 100 euros. In addition, sensors from the manufacturer Barani Design record rainfall and temperature at close intervals. The measurement data is transmitted using the open LoRaWAN radio standard. Today the market offers a wide range of LoRaWAN sensors, which keeps prices moderate. Compared with laboratory values collected only weekly or monthly, the continuous electronic measurements also show how, for example, pH and conductivity change shortly after weather events.
At the end of the development, the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere per hectare and year is to be documented and certified. Farmers, for example, could then prove how much carbon dioxide they capture per field, which would open up a source of income for them through trading in certificates.