Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify Commit $925M for Permanent Carbon Removal

pcmag.com:

Online payment processor Stripe teamed up with Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey & Company to invest in carbon removal technologies.

Their new initiative, dubbed Frontier, aims to buy an initial $925 million-worth of permanent carbon removal by 2030, scaling up deployment and making it affordable for other firms looking to curb their own pollution.

"The goal is to send a strong demand signal to researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors that there is a growing market for these technologies," according to the program website. "Frontier aims to help create net new carbon removal supply rather than compete over what exists today."

The group will act on behalf of buyers and suppliers, facilitating agreements and aggregating demand for buyers that want to draw down greenhouse gas emissions and suppliers that do it for them.

While each buyer determines their maximum annual spend between 2022 and 2030, Frontier aggregates demand to determine an estimated price cap and facilitates purchases up to that amount. "We expect annual amounts of money spent and tonnage removed to increase substantially over the life of the commitment as the field of carbon removal matures," the project page explains.

Frontier has set strict criteria for participants, including the ability to store carbon for more than 1,000 years, charge less than $100 per ton at scale, reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, and use scientifically transparent methods for monitoring and verifying. Importantly, solutions must result in new carbon removal—clients can't simply take credit for disposal that was already going to occur.

"Frontier will target technologies that are high quality and have the greatest long-term potential, rather than what is cheap today," according