Google's biggest carbon removal buy is a rice-field contract with no price

Google has signed its largest carbon-removal purchase to date, a two-million-ton contract with the enhanced-rock-weathering firm Terradot that splits delivery between one million tons of near-term methane impact by 2030 and one million tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal by 2040. The tonnes come from more than 200,000 hectares of rice farmland in Rio Grande do Sul, southern Brazil, where methane avoidance in rice cultivation runs on the same fields as permanent removal.

Enhanced rock weathering speeds up a reaction rainwater already has with silicate rock: the rock is crushed to powder, spread across farmland, and as it dissolves it produces alkalinity that pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere and into water as bicarbonate. The geochemistry is the science; what gets financed is land access, application logistics and field measurement across a working agricultural region, which means the near-term tonne is the one the project has to prove first.

Randy Spock, who heads carbon removal at Google, called the agreement “a template, not a one-off” and said it was structured so that any buyer, supplier or government could follow the same approach. Terradot chief executive James Kanoff said the project pairs two proven technologies at scale rather than trading near-term action against permanent removal. Google is also providing an R&D grant to Terradot and to Stanford's Doerr School biogeochemistry lab, which suggests it is buying measurement capacity alongside tonnes.

The template has a first draft: Google and Terradot signed a 200,000-ton removal deal in 2024, with credits expected in the early 2030s, and since then Terradot has signed a 12,000-ton agreement with Microsoft plus a $33 million agreement with Frontier, the buying consortium whose founding members include Alphabet and Meta and whose buyers will secure 78,707 tons of CO2 between 2027 and 2030. Set against Google's two million tons, those contracts describe a supplier whose delivery schedule is one buyer's exposure. Earlier this year Terradot acquired ERW rival Eion, consolidating supply in a market where the scarce asset is the signed offtake.

No price appears in the announcement, the same pattern as Google's virtual power plant with PG&E, where the price stays private. This publication has argued that unpriced transition deals are the default rather than the exception, and the company's largest carbon purchase does not break the rule. The omission costs more here than in a power contract: the figure a second buyer would need to replicate this template is cost per ton, and the template as written does not carry it.

The 2030 tranche is the one to watch. Methane avoidance in a working rice system is the near-term deliverable, with permanent removal falling due a decade later, and Google's Fervo geothermal deal carried a version of the same delivery question. Here delivery is a farm's operating year across 200,000 hectares, which puts the rice harvest of Rio Grande do Sul on the transition capital stack.