Dive Brief:
- Google announced a new carbon removal deal last week that will help cut methane emissions and scale sustainable rice farming practices in India in exchange for 1 million carbon credits.
- The tech giant signed a four-year deal with India-based carbon removal company Mitti Labs that will run until 2030, which will create the carbon credits by helping smallholder farmers — or farms on less than 10 hectare plots — in the country transition to alternate wetting and drying practices used in their rice-growing practices, Mitti said in a release.
- For Google, the announcement comes amid a spate of clean power deals announced by the company. Since the start of the month, the tech giant has announced power purchase agreements for advanced geothermal and its first nuclear PPA in Europe, as well as deals for a solar and storage deal and a virtual power plant.
Dive Insight:
The International Panel on Climate Change found in 1996 that global rice cultivation accounts for between 10-12% of global methane emissions annually; methane is emitted in the rice production process when organic materials decompose in the flooded fields used for cultivation. Mitti said its process of transitioning farmers to alternate wetting and drying would halve methane emissions and reduce the amount of water used for irrigation by 40% and is done “without sacrificing yield.”
The GHG emissions expected to be avoided by the deal is equivalent to the warming impact of 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over 20 years and 1 million metric tons over 100 years, Google and Mitti said Thursday.
Google announced the deal in a Sept. 10 company blog, alongside a variety of other investments in India, including investments to accelerate rooftop solar adoption; signing a long-term power purchase agreement with ReNew Power; and adding water stewardship and waste and circularity to its climate technology center’s focus areas.
Mitti launched in 2023 and said that by 2030 it expects to expand to more than 100,000 hectares of land. The company said it uses a geospatial artificial intelligence platform, developed with the help of NASA, to help measure crop health, soil moisture and flooding status at an individual smallholder farmer level.
Mitti’s financial backers include Aramco Ventures and the Cisco Foundation; the company recently closed a $9.5 million funding round last month. Mitti Labs Co-founder Xavier Laguarta said in the release that “reducing methane from rice farming is one of the most powerful levers we have to slow near-term warming.”
Google has previously backed deals to cut superpollutants — greenhouse gases that warm the atmosphere more than carbon dioxide on a per-ton basis — and the company reiterated in its Sept. 10 blog that if it uses credits from those deals to offset its emissions, it will “ensure they are either matched against shorter-lived emissions in [Google’s] footprint or replaced with carbon removals as their atmospheric impact expires.”
Google Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt said in Mitti’s release that the tech company is “committed to finding the most promising solutions that neutralize warming across both the near and long term.”
The search engine and tech conglomerate also announced the initial cohort of its AI for the Planet program for the Asia-Pacific region last week, which included four climate tech startups from India. The cohort includes two other nature-based carbon removal companies that focus on smallholder farmers, Farmers for Forests and Varaha Climate; Climitra Climate, a carbon removal company using AI to find invasive species, remove them and turn them into biochar; and Terrastack, which uses AI to provide plot-level intelligence for farmers.
Google’s deal with ReNew Power will give the company the environmental attributes from the deal and clean energy generated from a 150-megawatt project in Rajasthan, India, according to the company blog.
