Countering Climate Change: Google and Big Companies Invest in Carbon Dioxide Removal
In an effort to mitigate the impact of their pollution on the climate, big companies like Google have invested heavily in a plan to trap carbon dioxide using rocks. Recently, Google announced multimillion-dollar deals with a Sheryl Sandberg-backed startup called Terradot.
Google Leads the Charge in Carbon Dioxide Removal
Alongside H&M Group and Salesforce, these companies collectively agreed to pay Terradot $27 million to remove 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The deals were brokered by Frontier, a carbon removal initiative led by Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability.
Separately, Google announced its own deal to purchase an additional 200,000 tons of carbon removal from Terradot. Both companies declined to disclose how much that deal is worth. If the cost is similar to the Frontier agreement – roughly $300 per ton of CO2 captured – it could add up to $60 million.
A New Approach to Carbon Removal
"It’s a big deal," says Oliver Jagoutz, a professor of geology at MIT. "I think it should go a little out of the academic world into the industrial world. And I wish these guys all the best."
Terradot grew out of a research project at Stanford, where CEO James Kanoff and CPO Sasankh Munukutla were undergraduate students at the time. Shortly before graduating in 2022, they co-founded the company along with Kanoff’s former professor, Scott Fendorf, who is now Terradot’s chief scientist and technical advisor.
Before starting that research project, Kanoff had briefly dropped out of Stanford during the COVID pandemic to co-found a nonprofit called the Farmlink Project that connects food banks to farms with excess produce. Kanoff met Sandberg through that initiative, which is how he was able to get the former Facebook COO’s support for Terradot as an investor.
The Science Behind Enhanced Rock Weathering
Carbon dioxide removal encompasses a suite of strategies to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These technologies could potentially help slow climate change by trapping some of the pollution fossil fuels have already released over the years.
However, there are still concerns about its costs, safety, and potential to delay a transition from fossil fuels to carbon pollution-free energy. Experts say carbon removal is no substitute for preventing greenhouse gas emissions in the first place.
Enhanced rock weathering attempts to speed up a natural process that might otherwise take thousands of years. Rainfall naturally ‘weathers’ or breaks down rock, releasing calcium and magnesium and triggering a chemical reaction that traps CO2 in water as bicarbonate. Groundwater carrying that bicarbonate eventually makes its way to the ocean to permanently sequester CO2.
Challenges Ahead
However, it’s harder to figure out how much calcium, magnesium, and bicarbonate makes it to the ocean to permanently sequester CO2. Fertilizer in the soil can also potentially limit how much carbon is captured through enhanced rock weathering.
"How much they sequester is still the outstanding question," Jagoutz says. "But he doesn’t think that uncertainty needs to stop trials in the real world."
A Small Step Towards a Cleaner Future
Related Google’s future data centers will be built next to solar and wind farms, a move towards cleaner energy. In fact, Google has recently announced plans to help develop advanced nuclear reactors and new solar and wind farms to power its data centers with carbon pollution-free electricity.
When it comes down to it, switching to clean energy is the only effective way to stop climate change. Carbon removal, at best, is just an attempt to counteract some of a company’s legacy of pollution while they make that energy transition.
A Long Way to Go
Even though Google says it signed the biggest ERW deal to date, 200,000 tons of carbon removal is still a small fraction of the 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution it was responsible for last year.
"It’s very clear that this is not a substitute for emissions reductions at all," Kanoff says. "We need both of these tools. Any of the partners we’re even thinking about working with, they have some of the most aggressive emission reduction strategies of any of the companies really in the world."
A Call to Action
The future is uncertain, but one thing is clear: we need a collective effort to combat climate change. As Jagoutz so aptly puts it, "Why not try?"
