Google announced on Wednesday (Sept. 16) the largest carbon removal purchase in its history. The agreement with Terradot, a removal company operating in Brazil and the United States in which Google is an investor, starts in the rice paddies of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state and its main rice grower. Together, the two parts of the project add up to 2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2040, spread over more than 200,000 hectares of farmland. The deal value was not disclosed.
One fast front, one permanent
The shorter part runs to 2030: 1 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in avoided methane emissions from the state's paddies. According to Folha de S.Paulo, Terradot will help local farmers adopt alternate wetting and drying, a technique that drains the fields at intervals and cuts both methane formation and water use. As CNN Brasil notes, this figure counts emissions avoided and converted into CO2 equivalent, and will be verified separately from the second part.
The second part, by 2040, is the actual removal of 1 million tonnes of CO2 using ground volcanic rock, mostly basalt, spread on farmland. Rainwater turns atmospheric CO2 into carbonic acid, which reacts with minerals in the rock and forms bicarbonate, a stable molecule that moves into groundwater and eventually the ocean. Terradot says the carbon stays out of the atmosphere for more than 10,000 years, which is why the method counts as permanent removal.
Why Rio Grande do Sul, and what comes next
The companies say the state offers the right conditions: tropical soils, a hot and humid climate, irrigated rice and basalt quarries nearby. Rice matters to the global methane account, since flooded paddies generate 10% to 12% of the world's emissions of the gas, according to an estimate cited by Reuters. A molecule of methane warms the planet about 30 times as much as a molecule of CO2, though it stays in the atmosphere for roughly a decade, compared with up to a century for CO2. According to the companies, this is the largest enhanced rock weathering project ever announced and the first at this scale to combine cutting a super pollutant with durable removal.
"While most climate solutions focus on either short- or long-term horizons, our partnership with Terradot will address both timelines simultaneously," Google said in a statement.
The model is meant to be copied. Brazil grows rice on more than 1.5 million hectares, and Terradot plans pilot projects in other producer countries such as India and Vietnam from 2026, with commercial expansion from 2028. "With this new model, every tonne of removal meets the same rigorous standard and delivers climate impact faster than ever," said James Kanoff, CEO of Terradot. Price remains a hurdle: Reuters reported that an earlier Terradot contract, for 90,000 tonnes, cost close to US$300 per tonne, and the company says the new project has not yet reached the US$100 mark many developers see as the level needed to scale the market. How much of the credit revenue will reach rice farmers was also not disclosed. In 2024, Google had already bought 200,000 tonnes of removal credits from Terradot and invested in the company.
For Google, the deal answers a balance sheet that keeps getting worse. As Folha reported, the company's emissions rose 18% in 2025 to 14.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, a direct result of artificial intelligence and the energy demand of data centers. Pollution is up 80% since 2019, and the carbon neutrality goal for 2030, set in 2021, has moved further away. The total could be larger, because Google uses an "ambition-based emissions" metric that excludes activities considered peripheral. The 2 million tonnes in the deal, combining both parts, equal about 14% of what Google emitted in 2025 alone.