Commercial, Energy Efficiency, GHG Emissions  -  December 16, 2024

Google, Stripe, Shopify Sign Carbon Removal Agreement

Several companies, including tech company Google, signed an agreement for carbon removal set to deliver over the next several years.

The agreements include a 90,000-ton, $27 million purchase by Frontier buyers for delivery between 2025 and 2029. Google, a Frontier member, signed an additional deal with Terradot to remove 200,000 tons in 2029 and beyond. This reprsents the tech giant’s largest single purchase of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and also its largest single purchase from an enhanced weathering project. 

Frontier has facilitated purchases on behalf of Frontier founding members Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability, as well as Autodesk, H&M Group, Workday, and Salesforce. Also, Aledade, Canva, Match Group, Samsara, SKIMS, Skyscanner, Wise, and Zendesk have purchased via Watershed's partnership with Frontier.

Early purchases from Frontier buyers for deployments between 2025 and 2030 will lower the price per ton, allowing Google to benefit from reduced costs for later deployment.

Terradot, a climate company, launched with the goal of scaling Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) as a cornerstone of global carbon removal efforts. The company debuts with $58.2 million in funding from some of the biggest names in climate and technology, as well as signed agreements to remove nearly 300,000 tons of CO2 from earth’s atmosphere — the largest volume of carbon removal sold by an ERW company.

Founded in 2022 at Stanford, Terradot aims to transform the natural process of rock weathering into a global carbon removal solution within the next decade. Terradot has assembled a team of leading scientists, engineers and operators who are working to solve some of the most important problems in ERW: defining the exact parameters that maximize CO2 uptake and creating the highest precision measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) tools. 

Terradot is already running scaled pilot operations in Brazil, leveraging existing farmland in close proximity to quarries to reduce the complexity and cost of project development and deployment. In just over a year of operations in Brazil, Terradot has spread more than 48,000 tons of rock over 1,800 hectares of agricultural land. These trials have generated promising early results, showing that tropical temperature and humidity can improve weathering rates.

“To unlock enhanced rock weathering as a useful tool for CO2 removal, we need to deploy it at scale and learn how to measure the results rigorously using real-world data,” said Randy Spock, Carbon Credits and Removals Lead for Google, in a statement. “Terradot is well-positioned to do that work in an especially promising geography, and we’re excited to support them to help deliver significant amounts of CO2 removal both for Google’s net zero goal and for the planet.”

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