Google's 1 Million Rice-Methane Credits Come With an Expiry in Its Accounting

One Million Credits, or 3 Million Tonnes Over 20 Years

Google has agreed to buy 1 million carbon credits from Indian climate tech startup Mitti Labs, generated by cutting methane from rice cultivation and delivered by 2030. In a September 10 post on its India blog, Google called it the largest publicly announced agreement to date for credits from rice-methane reductions. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The projects cover rice farms in the Indian states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and will reach about 100,000 hectares at peak delivery, TechCrunch reported. Farmers switch from keeping paddies continuously flooded to Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), draining and re-flooding fields in cycles. Mitti Labs says the technique cuts methane emissions by about 50% and irrigation water use by about 40% without lowering yields.

The headline tonnage depends on the time frame. According to Google, the project aims for roughly 3 million tonnes of CO2e in near-term warming impact measured with a 20-year global warming potential (GWP20). Over the conventional 100-year period (GWP100), that is 1 million tonnes of CO2e. The 20-year figure reflects methane’s stronger warming effect in the near term.

Founded in 2023 and based in New York and Bengaluru, Mitti Labs combines satellite synthetic aperture radar imagery with field measurements to track crop growth, soil moisture and flooding on individual smallholder plots. Before signing, Google scrutinized that monitoring technology and visited farms, according to TechCrunch. The credits can be issued under either Gold Standard or Isometric certification.

Google Put an Expiry on How the Credits Count

Google also spelled out how it will use the credits. If it uses them to counterbalance emissions, it says, it will either match them against shorter-lived emissions in its own footprint or replace them with carbon removals as their atmospheric impact expires. The accounting follows the point at which the benefit of a methane cut runs out.

Google’s own emissions sit in the background. Its greenhouse gas emissions grew 18% in 2025 to about 14.5 million tonnes of CO2e, TechCrunch reported, citing the company’s environmental report, as Google invests heavily in AI infrastructure with a goal of net-zero emissions by 2030. In January 2025 it agreed to buy 100,000 tons of carbon credits from Indian startup Varaha, which TechCrunch described as Google’s first large-scale purchase of carbon removal credits in the country and the largest involving biochar made from biomass.

The Quality Label for Rice Methane Arrived in February, With Conditions

Standards for rice-methane credits moved this year as well. On February 5, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) approved version 1.0 of Gold Standard’s methodology for methane emission reduction by adjusted water management practice in rice cultivation under its Core Carbon Principles (CCP). It was the first rice cultivation methane avoidance methodology the council approved, and the approval came with two conditions: activities must demonstrate additionality using the activity penetration approach, and must apply a rule update that accounts for the risk of soil organic carbon loss.

The weight of those conditions shows in credits that already exist. About 50,000 credits have been issued under the methodology, and the council said it understands that none of them comply with the first condition, so they are not eligible for CCP labels. Gold Standard expects to issue up to 3.2 million credits over the next five years, from projects located mainly in India.

Isometric has published its own Rice Methane Reduction protocol, version 1.0. Its baseline is continuously flooded rice, but in regions where a single mid-season drainage is already standard practice, that practice can serve as the baseline and only the incremental change from one drainage to multiple drainages is eligible for crediting. Projects must state in their project design document which baseline scenario reflects business as usual.

Even the size of the source varies by who is counting. ICVCM cites a 2025 study putting rice paddies at roughly 7% of global methane emissions. Isometric’s protocol says about 8% of human-generated methane, Mitti Labs’ press release says more than 10% of global methane, and Google’s post says up to 12% of all methane emissions. The denominators are not all the same, so any market-size claim built on these figures needs its source named alongside it.

Korea Already Pays Farmers to Drain Their Paddies

The same practice already draws government money in Korea. Announcing a carbon neutrality program pilot in January 2024, Korea’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs said farms practicing mid-season drainage would receive 150,000 won per hectare, and farms using shallow intermittent irrigation 160,000 won per hectare. The 2026 low-carbon farming pilot notice posted in January by the Paju Agricultural Technology Center lists the same rates, and applicants must be farming corporations or producer groups able to consolidate at least 15 hectares.

That notice also names similar programs: a pilot for spreading low-carbon rice water management technology, voluntary greenhouse gas reduction projects, and external offset projects under Korea’s emissions trading scheme. How overlaps with those are handled is left to page 5 of the program guidelines rather than the notice itself.

A team designing rice-methane credits in Korea has two questions to settle first. One is the baseline: if a single mid-season drainage is treated as standard practice, as Isometric’s protocol provides, creditable reductions shrink to the increment above it. The other is whether the same field can receive the government payment and sit inside a credit project at the same time. Mitti Labs, for its part, is taking the model beyond India, with operations in the Philippines planned for later this year and expansion into Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in 2027.