Carbon Removal Leader Terradot Acquires Eion to Scale Climate Tech
Carbon removal startup Terradot has acquired competitor Eion in a strategic move signaling consolidation across the enhanced rock weathering sector. The February 6, 2026 announcement reveals how major investors—including Google, Microsoft, and sovereign wealth funds—are pushing smaller climate tech firms to merge in order to handle billion-dollar carbon removal contracts. Both companies deploy crushed minerals on farmland to pull CO₂ from the atmosphere, but Eion's standalone operations proved too limited to meet growing corporate demand for gigaton-scale solutions. The merger creates the industry's first truly global enhanced rock weathering platform spanning Brazil and the United States.
Credit: Wayne Hutchinson/Farm Images/Universal Images / Getty Images
Why Scale Suddenly Matters in Carbon Removal
Just two years ago, carbon removal startups competed fiercely for early pilot projects and modest corporate commitments. Today's landscape has transformed dramatically. Tech giants and sovereign investors now demand suppliers capable of delivering millions of tons of verified carbon removal annually—not thousands. This shift reflects mounting pressure on corporations to meet science-based net-zero targets that require actual atmospheric carbon drawdown, not just emissions reductions.
Sovereign wealth funds leading this consolidation wave want partners with operational footprints across multiple continents, robust supply chains for mineral sourcing, and proven capacity to verify carbon removal at scale. Smaller players like Eion, despite promising technology and early traction with U.S. farmers, simply couldn't expand fast enough to satisfy these requirements alone. The acquisition solves this bottleneck overnight, merging Terradot's Brazilian basalt operations with Eion's American olivine network into a single coordinated platform.
How Enhanced Rock Weathering Actually Removes Carbon
Enhanced rock weathering accelerates a natural geological process that has regulated Earth's climate for millions of years. When rainwater—slightly acidic from dissolved atmospheric CO₂—contacts certain silicate minerals, a chemical reaction occurs that permanently binds carbon into stable bicarbonate compounds. These eventually wash into oceans and form carbonate sediments, locking away carbon for thousands of years.
The innovation lies in crushing volcanic rocks like basalt or olivine into fine particles and spreading them across agricultural fields. This dramatically increases surface area exposure to rain and soil acids, speeding up carbon capture from geological timescales to just months or years. Farmers gain additional benefits: these minerals naturally balance soil pH and provide essential nutrients like magnesium and iron, often replacing traditional agricultural lime applications. Unlike tree planting—which stores carbon temporarily and risks reversal through wildfires—enhanced rock weathering offers permanent, measurable carbon removal with co-benefits for food production.
Basalt Meets Olivine: Two Minerals, One Mission
Terradot's operations have centered on Brazil's vast basalt deposits, leveraging the country's expansive farmland and favorable regulatory environment for carbon removal projects. Basalt offers advantages in abundance and lower processing costs, though its carbon capture rate per ton is modest compared to faster-reacting minerals.
Eion built its business around olivine, a magnesium-rich silicate that reacts more aggressively with CO₂. The company focused on U.S. Midwest farms, partnering directly with growers to integrate crushed olivine into existing lime application schedules. Olivine's faster reaction kinetics mean more carbon removed per ton applied, but sourcing sufficient quantities at competitive prices has challenged scalability.
The merger strategically combines these complementary approaches. Terradot gains immediate U.S. operational presence and olivine expertise, while Eion accesses Terradot's Brazilian infrastructure, mineral sourcing networks, and relationships with major corporate buyers. Together, they can match mineral type to regional soil conditions and farmer needs—deploying basalt where cost efficiency matters most and olivine where rapid verification timelines are critical.
The Pricing Chasm Threatening Carbon Removal's Future
Despite growing corporate demand, the carbon removal market faces a fundamental mismatch: suppliers need $150–300 per ton to operate profitably at scale, while most buyers still expect prices below $100 per ton. This gap has stalled project financing and forced consolidation as startups burn through venture capital without reaching sustainable unit economics.
Enhanced rock weathering sits in a particularly challenging position. It's cheaper than direct air capture systems but more expensive than avoided-deforestation credits that don't actually remove legacy carbon. The technology requires massive logistical operations—mining, crushing, transporting, and spreading millions of tons of rock—before generating any revenue. Verification adds further complexity, requiring soil sampling, isotopic analysis, and third-party certification before credits can be sold.
Terradot's acquisition of Eion represents a bet that consolidation will bridge this pricing gap. By combining operations, the merged entity can reduce per-ton costs through shared infrastructure, bulk mineral purchasing, and streamlined verification protocols. More importantly, they can offer corporate buyers a single contract covering multiple geographies—reducing procurement complexity that has slowed adoption.
Tech Giants Rewriting Climate Investment Rules
Google and Microsoft's backing of Terradot isn't merely financial—it's strategic market-making. Both companies have committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030, requiring them to remove more carbon than they emit annually. Their investments come paired with offtake agreements guaranteeing purchases of millions of tons of carbon removal credits through 2029 and beyond.
These commitments provide startups with the revenue certainty needed to secure debt financing for scaling operations—a critical hurdle in capital-intensive climate tech. More significantly, they signal to other corporations that enhanced rock weathering has crossed from experimental to investable. When Microsoft signs multi-year removal contracts and Google deploys engineering teams to improve measurement methodologies, the entire sector gains credibility with risk-averse institutional investors.
The acquisition reflects these investors' impatience with fragmented markets. Rather than backing multiple competing ERW startups, they're consolidating bets behind a single entity capable of delivering at the scale their climate pledges demand. This pattern mirrors earlier clean tech cycles where venture capital initially funded dozens of solar or battery startups before consolidation around dominant players.
What This Means for Farmers and Rural Communities
For the farmers partnering with these companies, consolidation brings both opportunities and questions. Larger operations could mean more reliable long-term contracts and better pricing for hosting carbon removal projects on their land. Enhanced rock weathering requires no changes to farming practices—minerals spread during routine lime applications—making it one of the least disruptive carbon removal methods for agricultural communities.
However, farmers rightly wonder whether a merged entity will maintain the personalized support smaller startups provided. Eion built its reputation on farmer-centric partnerships, treating growers as collaborators rather than mere landholders. Terradot must now prove it can scale operations without losing this trust-based approach that made early adoption possible.
The merger also raises questions about equitable benefit sharing. As carbon removal scales globally, ensuring farming communities receive fair compensation—not just token payments—will determine whether this technology gains widespread adoption or faces resistance as another extractive climate solution.
The Road Ahead for Atmospheric Carbon Removal
This acquisition marks a pivotal moment for carbon removal: the transition from startup experimentation to industrial-scale deployment. Enhanced rock weathering won't solve climate change alone—it must complement emissions reductions, renewable energy expansion, and other removal approaches like biochar and direct air capture. But its potential to remove gigatons of CO₂ annually using existing agricultural infrastructure makes it uniquely scalable among durable removal methods.
The merged Terradot-Eion entity now faces its real test: executing on promised scale while maintaining rigorous verification standards that preserve market integrity. Overpromising removal volumes or cutting corners on measurement would damage trust across the entire carbon removal sector. With Google and Microsoft watching closely—and climate scientists scrutinizing every claimed ton—there's little room for error.
For climate-conscious investors and corporations, this consolidation offers a clearer path forward. Rather than navigating a fragmented landscape of small ERW providers, they can now partner with a single entity capable of delivering verified removal across continents. Whether this accelerates meaningful atmospheric carbon drawdown—or simply creates another overhyped climate tech bubble—depends entirely on execution over the next 24 months. The science works. The minerals exist. Now the industry must prove it can operate at the scale our climate demands.
