Google, John Doerr Bet on Startup Using Crushed Rocks to Capture CO2

(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc.’s Google has made its largest purchase of carbon dioxide removal, backing a company that uses crushed rocks to clean the atmosphere. 

The tech giant is joined by Microsoft Corp. and investors including John Doerr and Sheryl Sandberg. 

Startup Terradot has raised nearly $60 million to commercialize its technology. It also signed agreements to pull 200,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere for Google and 90,000 tons for a group of carbon removal buyers known as Frontier. 

Scientists estimate the world will need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually by midcentury to avoid the worst effects of climate change and reach net zero. While small, the new agreements help corporate buyers like Google meet their net zero goals and allow the startup to take its carbon removal technologies out of the lab and into the real world. 

What’s known as enhanced rock weathering (ERW) is a technique to speed up natural carbon-sequestering processes by grinding and spreading rocks like basalt on fields. When rain falls, it causes a chemical reaction that draws CO2 out of the atmosphere and into the water, which eventually makes its way into the ocean where the carbon is locked up. The technique “has immense scale potential because it’s piggybacking on top of an established natural process,” said Randy Spock, Google’s carbon credits and removals lead. 

“We know this can happen, and our quest is just to make it fast,” said Scott Fendorf, Terradot’s chief scientific and technical advisor. Grinding the rock can help accelerate the natural CO2 sequestration process from millennia down to a matter of months. 

Terradot’s plan, like other ERW startups, is to buy the ground basalt from quarries and offer it to farmers nearby as a soil amendment to help with pH management. It will make money selling the resulting carbon credits, which Chief Executive Officer James Kanoff said will start by the middle of next year. The company has spent a year trialing its methods on farms across Brazil in partnership with state-owned agricultural research institution EMBRAPA.

ERW lags behind other methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere partly because measuring and verifying how much CO2 is actually removed is hard to do. Just over 2% of all carbon removal services sold rely on the technique, according to data from clearinghouse CDR.fyi.  

Doerr said he invested in part because of Terradot’s scientific team, which he dubbed the “strongest” in the ERW world. Spock said the science team also made Google comfortable with its purchase as well as Terradot’s advanced methods to track CO2 as it moves through the fields’ soils and down into streams and rivers. The company uses in-field sampling to measure the chemistry of soils and streams, helping determine CO2 uptake.

The way to address that challenge of measuring impact is simply to start deploying, said Spock. “Spread more rocks sooner, and measure it better.”

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