Mineralization & Enhanced Weathering

Alphabet backed its biggest carbon-removal project yet through Terradot, Reuters reported Wednesday, even as its shares slipped approximately 0.9% to $341.72. Terradot plans to deploy enhanced-weathering material across more than 200,000 hectares of rice fields in Brazil, targeting one million metric tons of methane-abatement credits by 2030 and another one million tons of carbon-removal credits by 2040, a removal target roughly ten times the scale of earlier rock-weathering projects. Google already owns an equity stake in Terradot, giving it exposure not just as a buyer of credits but as a financial backer of the technology itself. A 2024 Terradot transaction implied a removal cost of about $300 per ton, while developers see roughly $100 as a level that could unlock much broader adoption, though pricing for Google's latest agreement has not been disclosed. Alphabet's $341.72 share price stands 34.54% above its GF Value estimate of $253.99, putting more pressure on Google's massive AI and infrastructure spending to translate into durable growth.

Terradot and Google announced a megaton-scale climate project in Southern Brazil that pairs methane avoidance in rice farming with permanent carbon dioxide removal, marking Google's largest carbon removal purchase to date. Google will purchase 1M tonnes of near-term methane impact by 2030 and 1M tonnes of carbon removal impact by 2040, delivering 1M tonnes of impact by 2030. The project is the largest enhanced rock weathering project ever undertaken and the first of any kind to combine near-term methane elimination with durable carbon removal at this scale. Terradot will help rice farmers across more than 200,000 hectares starting in Rio Grande do Sul adopt Alternate Wetting and Drying, an irrigation practice that periodically drains flooded paddies to cut water use and sharply reduce methane, while spreading naturally sourced crushed volcanic rock on farmland to generate durable carbon removal. Terradot CEO James Kanoff said the project eliminates the trade-off between moving fast on near-term warming and removing carbon permanently, and Google Head of Carbon Removal Randy Spock said the agreement is built to be a template rather than a one-off. As part of the project, Google is providing an R&D grant to Terradot and to Stanford Doerr School's Soil & Environmental Biogeochemistry Lab to strengthen the scientific foundation of AWD as a methane mitigation strategy.