Brazil Climate Project Combines Methane Avoidance with Permanent Carbon Removal
A new climate project in Southern Brazil is combining methane avoidance in rice farming with permanent carbon dioxide removal. Terradot, a leader in enhanced rock weathering (ERW), and Google have announced the megaton-scale climate project, which pairs two proven technologies to tackle both near-term warming caused by superpollutants like methane and long-term warming driven by carbon dioxide.
The project will cover over 200,000 hectares of farmland across Rio Grande do Sul, where Terradot will help rice farmers adopt Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), an irrigation practice that reduces water use and methane emissions. At the same time, crushed volcanic rock will be spread on the farmland to generate durable carbon removal.
According to Terradot's CEO James Kanoff, 'For years, climate action has been framed as a choice, either move fast on the warming happening now or remove carbon permanently. Our project with Google eliminates that trade-off.'
The project is not only one of the largest ERW projects ever undertaken but also the first to combine near-term methane elimination with durable carbon removal at this scale. Google will purchase 1M tonnes of near-term methane impact by 2030 and 1M tonnes of carbon removal impact by 2040, making it its largest carbon removal purchase to date.