By Simon Jessop
LONDON, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Google has agreed its biggest carbon-removal deal yet, backing a project in Brazil run by developer Terradot that aims to both cut methane emissions from rice farming and capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, executives told Reuters.
Spanning more than 200,000 hectares in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, it is the largest enhanced rock-weathering project to date, aiming to accelerate a natural process where certain rocks absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.
The initiative, which Google said it hopes will serve as a template for future projects, is the first at such a scale to combine methane abatement and carbon removal, said Randy Spock, the company's head of carbon removal.
Tackling methane, a 'super-pollutant' greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere more quickly than carbon dioxide, helps slow global warming, but carbon dioxide removal is still needed over time to address centuries of accumulated emissions.
"We need to do both. We do not have the luxury of focusing all of our resources on going after short-lived super-pollutants, or all of our resources purely scaling long-term carbon removal," Spock said.
The project will generate 1 million metric tons of methane-abatement credits by 2030 and 1 million tons of carbon-removal credits by 2040, generated and verified separately. The carbon-removal portion of the deal is 10 times larger than previous rock-weathering projects.
Rice paddies account for 10% to 12% of global methane emissions, according to a 2021 assessment by the U.N. Environment Programme. Accelerating action on methane is expected to be central to the COP31 climate talks in Turkey later this year.
LOWER COSTS
Big Tech companies are under pressure to ramp up clean energy and carbon-removal investments to counter emissions from AI-driven data centres. Google is an investor in Terradot, after taking an equity stake in 2024.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said removal is needed to help hit the world's climate goals, although critics argue it can allow companies to continue polluting now.
The companies said the model could eventually be expanded across Brazil's 1.5 million hectares of rice fields and replicated in other rice-growing regions such as India and Vietnam.
Terradot plans to launch pilots across multiple countries in 2026, with commercial scale-up slated for 2028.
Google and Terradot did not disclose the price of the credits, but a publicly disclosed 2024 deal for 90,000 tons of carbon removal from Terradot implied a price of roughly $300 a ton — some way above the $100 a ton threshold many developers are targeting to stimulate broader demand.
CEO James Kanoff said the new project would be cheaper than previous deals and, while not yet at $100 per ton, represented "a big step toward that".
Terradot said as verification can add more than $100 per ton to enhanced rock-weathering costs, allowing carbon removal to accumulate for longer before third-party verification would help reduce that in the new project.
(Reporting by Simon Jessop; Editing by Manuela Andreoni and Jan Harvey)
