Google buys two climate products from one rice project

Google has agreed to buy two million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent out of a single project in Brazil: one million tons of methane elimination by 2030, and a further million tons of durable carbon removal by 2040. The counterparty is Terradot, an enhanced rock weathering company founded in 2022, and the work runs across more than 200,000 hectares of rice farmland, making it Google's largest CO2 removal deal to date, the largest ERW project ever undertaken, and the first of any kind to combine near-term methane elimination with durable carbon removal at scale. No price per ton is disclosed.

The contract sells two climate products off the same acres, pairing categories Google's removal program has funded separately until now. Methane warms far harder than CO2 while it lasts but leaves the atmosphere quickly; carbon removal is the slow, permanent leg. On the methane side, Terradot will help farmers adopt Alternate Wetting and Drying, an irrigation practice that periodically drains flooded paddies to cut water use and methane. Rice cultivation accounts for roughly 12% of global methane emissions, second only to livestock among agricultural sources, and much of it grows in basins under high or extremely high water stress.

The weathering leg is the harder product. Terradot crushes basalt and spreads it over farmland, accelerating the natural process by which CO2 dissolved in rainwater locks into rock over time, with soil health improving as a side effect. Randy Spock, who heads carbon removal at Google, described the agreement as built "to be a template, not a one-off." This is Google's second rice-methane offtake in a week. As this publication argued in covering the Mitti Labs deal, the unit that matters in rice methane is hectares under changed practice, not tonnage. Terradot's contract fits that reading: what Google is buying first is AWD adoption across 200,000 hectares, and the durable tonnage sits behind it as an option.

Run the arithmetic and the tonnage is thin. Two million tons spread across more than 200,000 hectares works out to roughly ten tons per hectare for the life of the agreement, though the coverage doesn't say which acres carry which tranche, whether the ERW volumes draw on the same fields, or who verifies the result. That thinness is precisely why the structure works. The methane leg is the cash that pays farmers to change practice now; the ERW leg is what a buyer pays for when it wants permanence. Google has bought the cheap leg's optionality to underwrite the expensive one, and the next ERW developer will be priced off this deal's cost per hectare rather than its cost per ton. Certification remains the unaddressed leg, and it is the chokepoint that will set the price of the generation of carbon assets that follows.

The test lands in 2030, when the first million tons comes due and the paddies have to prove it.