Google and McKinsey’s credit buy gets ambitious coalition off and running
A carbon credit buyers coalition designed to channel funds to high-integrity nature-based solutions has announced its first deals.
Google and McKinsey said late last week that they would purchase a combined 215,000 tons of carbon removal credits from Mombak, a Brazilian company that is reforesting degrading land in the Amazon. The purchase is a second vote of confidence for the project developer, which last year announced a 1.5 million-credit deal with Microsoft.
The recent deal was facilitated by the Symbiosis Coalition, a buyers’ coalition formed last year with the goal of securing commitments for 20 million tons of nature-based removal credits. REI and Bain were announced as new members last week, joining existing participants Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce.
Due diligence
The Mombak deal is the first to emerge from the coalition’s review of the 185 responses from 40 countries that it received after issuing a request for proposals around a year ago. The project passed muster because of its commitment to create a resilient forest populated by a high proportion of native species, a model designed to keep carbon locked up for at least 100 years.
The project also addresses a consequence that has undermined other reforestation schemes: that protecting land causes activities taking place on it, such as cattle grazing, to move to nearby undeveloped spaces, which only prompts further deforestation. Mombak will tackle that risk, known as “leakage,” through low-interest loans that enable ranchers to intensify existing operations and absorb displaced grazing activity.
Google had already purchased 50,000 credits from Mombak, but the due diligence carried out by Symbiosis helped convince the tech giant to contract for another 200,000, said Randy Spock, the company’s carbon credits and removals lead.
“The ability of Symbiosis to gather as much data as possible about nature restoration projects and then put all those projects up against a common yardstick of what meticulously accurate measurements ought to look like, according to the latest science, is a huge value to the field,” he added.
The price of the credits was not revealed, but for a previous deal, announced in 2023, Mombak stated that credits cost more than $50 per ton.
Google’s portfolio
The purchase further diversifies Google’s credit portfolio. The company signed 16 deals in 2024 for a total of 730,000 removal credits at a cost of more than $100 million. The largest was for close to 220,000 tons from Terradot, a startup that spreads crushed rocks on farmland, which then react with rainwater and release fertilizing minerals and capture carbon dioxide. Earlier this year, Google said it would purchase credits equivalent to 1 million tons of CO2 from projects that prevent the release of methane and hydrofluorocarbons, two highly potent greenhouse gases.
Google’s most recent environmental report notes that it did not apply any credits to its emissions inventory in 2024 but plans to do so starting in 2030, the year it has targeted for reaching net zero.
Hitting that target will likely require Google to retire millions of credits annually. The portion of the company’s footprint covered by its net-zero target reached 11 million tons in 2024, a rise of more than 50 percent since 2019. Like its rival Microsoft, which plans to retire millions of credits annually to hit a 2030 carbon-negative target, Google’s purchases are driven in part by the need to counter increasing emissions from the data centers that power AI services.
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