Google announced a partnership with Terradot to implement a climate project on rice farms in southern Brazil, combining rapid methane emissions reductions with long-term carbon dioxide removal. Under the agreement, Google will purchase the equivalent of one million metric tons of methane removal by 2030, calculated using a GWP 20 metric, in addition to one million metric tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal by 2040.
Google says the agreement is the largest carbon removal purchase it has announced to date, and that it is the first announced project of this scale to combine, within the same agricultural system, the elimination of a short-lived climate pollutant with long-term carbon removal.
How does the project work?
The project will be applied across more than 200,000 hectares of rice farms. Terradot will help farmers adopt Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), which involves periodically draining flooded rice fields instead of keeping them continuously flooded. According to the article, this reduces emissions of methane, which remains in the atmosphere for a shorter period than carbon dioxide, thereby achieving a faster climate impact.
Natural powdered volcanic rocks will be spread across the same fields. As these rocks dissolve over time, they will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW). The plan is based on the expectation that rapid methane reductions will allow sufficient time for permanent carbon removal to develop gradually.
Why does this news matter?
The project's technical value lies not in using a single agricultural technology, but in linking two solutions that operate on different timelines. Methane reduction targets near-term temperature increases, while carbon dioxide sequestration is expected to address the climate impact over the long term. Google believes that combining the two could achieve a net reduction in warming across different time horizons, rather than relying on a single measure with a limited scope.
The company also mentions potential benefits for farmers; AWD can reduce water consumption and lower input costs, while the crushed rocks may contribute to improved soil health. However, these benefits were included in Google's description of the project, and the article has not provided operational data or independent measurement results proving their scale so far.
Scalability and open limitations
The partnership chose southern Brazil because its soil and climate are suitable, and its flooded rice-growing systems are conducive to accelerating weathering, in addition to the proximity of basalt quarries to agricultural land. Google says the model can first be expanded to 1.5 million hectares of rice cultivated in Brazil, and then to other regions around the world. It is also funding research to study AWD's ability to reduce methane in different rice systems.
However, the announcement does not clarify the price details, mechanisms for verifying the quantities, the operational implementation schedule, or how the climate impact will be calculated in practice over the coming decades. The agreement therefore represents a large-scale and significant project in the climate solutions market, but it does not yet prove that the model can be replicated globally with the same results. Independent data on measurement and agricultural and environmental performance remain necessary to evaluate it beyond the scope of the partnership announcement.