Google Carbon Removal and Superpollutant Elimination R&D Awards

Funding for R&D projects that target breakthroughs in understanding of the fundamental science or implementation of abatement and elimination strategies for carbon and superpollutants.

The Google Carbon Removal and Superpollutant Elimination R&D Awards provide support for R&D projects that target breakthroughs and step-changes in understanding of the fundamental science underlying mitigation strategies for the capture and/or elimination of carbon and superpollutants, or their ability for real world implementation.

The RFP has been scoped around specific research areas that represent the highest priorities for near-term R&D and address one, or both, of the following themes:

• Enhancing the certainty of a given mitigation strategy (both in terms of climate impact and the ability to measure impact).
• Enhancing the scale of a given mitigation strategy – targeting gigatonne scale for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), and megatonne scale for superpollutant emissions abatement.

Breakthroughs may originate from a broad range of disciplines. Strong proposals will describe a specific, credible, and measurable outcome and articulate the risks to project execution and provide an explanation of how the risks can be mitigated.

Proposals must be directly related to one of the identified priority research areas or fall within the remit of the Open Call. The scope for projects is broad and will consider anything within the scope of Research and Development, including but not limited to: theoretical, laboratory or field-based academic research; literature review or meta-analysis (where this clearly meets the stated objectives of a priority research area); engineering research or prototyping; data or modelling studies.

Proposals that meet the objectives of the priority research areas will be prioritised for funding before projects in the open call are considered.

Applicants may only submit one proposal per research area, but may submit separate applications to two different research areas.

The priority research areas for the 2026 Call for Applications are:

• Environmental and Ecological impacts of Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) – for a field trial to generate empirical evidence demonstrating the potential environmental and/or ecological impacts and co-benefits of OAE, with the aim of establishing operational frameworks and community support.
• Assessing the Scaling Potential of Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) – to evaluate the capacity of ocean alkalinity enhancement to scale beyond coastal outfalls while upholding environmental and ecosystem safety.
• Next-generation CO2 Capture Systems for Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) Facilities – to accelerate the integration of advanced CO2 capture systems into power-only BECCS systems to reduce the energy intensity and cost of carbon capture.
• Unlocking Underutilised Biomass Feedstocks to Scale Biochar Carbon Removal – to address the technical challenges of producing high-quality biochar from heterogeneous, high-moisture and/or distributed organic wastes to unlock novel sources of sustainable biomass for carbon removal.
• Improving the Resilience of Mangrove Restoration to Sea-level Rise – to advance predictive modelling and management strategies to ensure restored mangrove ecosystems can adapt to sea-level rise and maintain long-term carbon sequestration.
• Optimising Land Use in Nature-based Carbon Removal Projects – to evaluate how land marginality and productivity impact leakage, additionality, and durability in nature-based carbon removal projects, and use this to design projects that optimise land use for carbon removal efficiency and ecosystem integrity.
• Addressing the Energetic Challenges of Low-concentration CO2 Capture – validate novel capture materials with the potential to circumvent the high cost and/or high energy intensity of low-concentration CO2 capture, prioritising the scaled use of intermittent low-grade heat or a breakthrough advancement in the second-law thermodynamic efficiency of CO2 separation.
• Abatement of Methane in Diffuse Emission Streams – to accelerate the development of photochemical, photocatalytic or thermocatalytic oxidation systems for abating dilute, low-concentration diffuse methane emissions.
• Improve Constraints on Methane Lifetime in the Atmosphere and its Underlying Removal Mechanisms – to resolve uncertainties in the relationship between atmospheric oxidation capacity and methane lifetime, and thereby refine constraints on methane lifetime.
• Optimising the Climate Impact of Carbon Removal through Tidal Wetland Restoration – to develop frameworks for tidal wetland restoration that optimise for the scale and permanence of carbon sequestration while minimising methane emissions.
• Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) for Open-system Landfill Interventions – to develop and/or validate methane emissions models at small-scale landfill systems, enabling these models to be incorporated into standardised MRV methodologies for open-system interventions.
• Development, Field Validation, and Climate Impact Verification of Perennial Crop Systems – to advance the genetic development, field-scale agronomy, and empirical carbon and emissions accounting of perennial grains, oilseeds, and pulse crops to enable scalable, high-certainty agricultural climate mitigation.
• Open Call: Breakthroughs in Carbon Removal and Superpollutant Abatement – for projects aiming to achieve step-change advancements in the certainty, scale, or affordability of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or superpollutant abatement, or in the quantification of their climate impact.

There is no specified maximum project duration, however it is expected that proposals will include outcomes that can be achieved within two years of receiving funding.