By Simon Jessop <\/p>\n
LONDON, Sept 16 (Reuters) – Google has agreed its biggest carbon-removal deal yet, backing a project in Brazil run by developer Terradot that aims to both cut methane emissions from rice farming and \u200ccapture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, executives told Reuters. <\/p>\n
Spanning more than 200,000 hectares in the southern state of \u200cRio Grande do Sul, it is the largest enhanced rock-weathering project to date, aiming to accelerate a natural process where certain rocks absorb CO2 \u200bfrom the atmosphere. <\/p>\n
The initiative, which Google said it hopes will serve as a template for future projects, is the first at such a scale to combine methane abatement and carbon removal, said Randy Spock, the company’s head of carbon removal. <\/p>\n
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 \u200cover time to address centuries of accumulated \u2060emissions. <\/p>\n
“We need to do both. We do not have the luxury of focusing all of our resources on going after short-lived super-pollutants, or all of our resources purely scaling long-term carbon removal,” \u2060Spock said. <\/p>\n
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. The carbon-removal portion of the deal is 10 times larger than previous rock-weathering projects. <\/p>\n
Rice paddies account for \u200b10% \u200bto 12% of global methane emissions, according to a 2021 assessment \u200bby the U.N. Environment Programme. Accelerating action on \u200cmethane is expected to be central to the COP31 climate talks in Turkey later this year. <\/p>\n
LOWER COSTS <\/p>\n
Big Tech companies are under pressure to ramp up clean energy and carbon-removal investments to counter emissions from AI-driven data centres. Google is an investor in Terradot, after taking an equity stake in 2024. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
The companies said the \u200cmodel could eventually be expanded across Brazil’s 1.5 million hectares of rice \u200bfields and replicated in other rice-growing regions such as India and Vietnam. <\/p>\n
Terradot \u200bplans to launch pilots across multiple countries in \u200b2026, with commercial scale-up slated for 2028. <\/p>\n
Google and Terradot did not disclose the price of the \u200ccredits, but a publicly disclosed 2024 deal for 90,000 \u200btons of carbon removal from \u200bTerradot implied a price of roughly $300 a ton \u2014 some way above the $100 a ton threshold many developers are targeting to stimulate broader demand. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Simon Jessop LONDON, Sept 16 (Reuters) – Google has agreed its biggest carbon-removal deal yet, backing a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[5377,44372,246,1711,61,60,39287,82],"class_list":["post-626772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-carbon-dioxide","tag-carbon-removal","tag-environment","tag-google","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-methane-emissions","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}