Google has announced the largest carbon reduction deal in the company’s history. The American technology giant is supporting a major environmental project in Brazil, which is being developed by Terradot. The initiative has two main goals: reducing methane emissions from rice farming and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The project covers more than 200,000 hectares in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. It is the largest project so far to use enhanced rock weathering, a technology designed to speed up the natural process through which certain rocks absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. According to Randy Spock, head of Google’s carbon removal division, the initiative could become a model for similar projects in the future.
It is also one of the first projects on such a large scale to combine methane reduction with carbon dioxide removal, reports. Methane is a particularly powerful greenhouse gas. Although it remains in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than carbon dioxide, it traps significantly more heat.
Reducing methane emissions can therefore help slow global warming in the short term. However, experts say that removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will also be necessary to deal with emissions that have accumulated over many decades. Under the project, methane emissions are expected to be reduced by the equivalent of 1 million tons by 2030, while another 1 million tons of carbon dioxide is expected to be removed from the atmosphere by 2040.
The results of the two activities will be measured and verified separately. Rice cultivation is particularly important in the fight against methane emissions. According to a 2021 assessment by the United Nations Environment Programme, rice fields are responsible for around 10–12% of global methane emissions.
This is mainly because rice is often grown in flooded fields, where low-oxygen conditions allow methane-producing microorganisms to thrive. One interesting feature of the Brazilian project is that it combines an established agricultural activity with a relatively new carbon-removal technology. If the approach proves successful, similar projects could potentially be developed in other major rice-producing regions around the world.
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