Google agrees biggest carbon-removal deal: What to know

Google has reportedly agreed to its largest carbon-removal deal yet on Wednesday, as the company seeks to both cut methane emissions from rice farming and capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The project is primarily run in Brazil by the developer Terradot that two-pronged reduction of methane emissions from ice farming and capture carbon dioxide from the climate. This marks one of the largest enhanced rock-weathering projects, fast-tracking research into a natural process where certain rocks absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.

Google said that this initiative will serve as a basis for future projects-marking the first at such a scale to combine methane abatement and carbon removal. While managing methane as a super-pollutant greenhouse gas slows immediate atmospheric warming, carbon dioxide removal is still required to gradually draw down historical emissions.

In this connection, the company’s head of carbon removal, Randy Spock said: “ 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.”

The project will generate 1 million metric tons of methane reduction credits by 2030 and 1 million tons of carbon-removal credits by 2040. At present, big tech companies are pressed to fast-track decarbonization investments to counter emissions from AI-driven centers. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has further asserted that removal is required to help hit the world’s climate goals while underlining that it should not act as an official authorization to continue polluting.

CEO James Kanoff said the new project would be more economical than previous agreements although a price under $100 ton has not been yet achieved. Terradot said that evidence showing enhanced rock-weathering costs remains over $100 per ton while prolonging carbon sequestration for longer before third-party verification would help scale down costs in the new project.