Google signs largest carbon-removal deal with Terradot in Brazil

September 16, 2026 at 05:05 PM2 min

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Google agreed its biggest carbon-removal deal yet, backing a Terradot project in Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul state spanning over 200,000 hectares. The project will generate 1 million metric tons of methane-abatement credits by 2030 and 1 million tons of carbon-removal credits by 2040. The deal comes as Big Tech faces pressure to offset emissions from AI-driven data centres.

Key Facts

The project spans more than 200,000 hectares in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, making it the largest enhanced rock-weathering project to date.
Google and Terradot did not disclose the price of the credits, but a 2024 deal for 90,000 tons implied a price of roughly $300 per ton.
Rice paddies account for 10% to 12% of global methane emissions, according to a 2021 UN Environment Programme assessment.
Terradot plans to launch pilots across multiple countries in 2026, with commercial scale-up slated for 2028.

Project Scale and Technology

The initiative combines methane abatement from rice farming with enhanced rock weathering to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It is the first project at such a scale to combine methane abatement and carbon removal, according to Randy Spock, Google's head of carbon removal. The carbon-removal portion of the deal is 10 times larger than previous rock-weathering projects. 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.

Climate Context and Industry Pressure

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. Big Tech companies are under pressure to ramp up clean energy and carbon-removal investments to counter emissions from AI-driven data centres. 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. Accelerating action on methane is expected to be central to the COP31 climate talks in Turkey later this year.

Expansion and Pricing

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. Google is an investor in Terradot, after taking an equity stake in 2024. A publicly disclosed 2024 deal for 90,000 tons of carbon removal from Terradot implied a price of roughly $300 a ton, above the $100 a ton threshold many developers are targeting to stimulate broader demand.