Frontier has launched to develop carbon removal technologies. The new company from Stripe, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Shopify, Meta (formerly Facebook), and McKinsey Sustainability will commit $925 million over the next nine years to purchase permanent carbon removal from suppliers building promising new solutions.
As the world races to find climate solutions, companies are investing heavily in carbon capture, removal and ways to offset emissions.
“With Frontier, we want to send a loud demand signal to entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors that there is a market for permanent carbon removal: build and we will buy,” Nan Ransohoff the head of climate at Stripe said.
A wholly owned subsidiary of Stripe, Frontier will also be funded by the tens of thousands of businesses who purchase carbon removal via Stripe Climate.
Frontier will work with early-stage carbon removal suppliers piloting new technologies as well as growth-stage suppliers scaling their technologies.
“Customers are critical to scaling any business; until recently there have been few for carbon removal. This commitment is a powerful signal that there will be a market for what we’re building at Charm. That makes it easier to scale, raise funds and, crucially, bring costs down faster,” Peter Reinhardt, CEO and Co-Founder, Charm Industrial.
Radical emissions reductions will be essential to avoiding the worst effects of climate change. However, recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change make clear there is currently no pathway to keeping global temperature increases within 1.5C without permanently removing gigatons of CO2 already present in the atmosphere and ocean.
Carbon removal technology has made significant progress, but it is still not on track to reach the required scale. As of 2021, fewer than 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide had been permanently removed from the atmosphere through these kinds of technologies. IPCC models require an average of around 6B tons of annual CO2 removal by 2050 to hit the 1.5C target.
