Google, Stripe, and Shopify have made carbon dioxide removal (CDR) prepurchases from Cella and PRONOE, allocating $3.05 million in deals facilitated by the Frontier coalition.
In this sixth round of prepurchases, Frontier intended to back companies looking to expand pilot projects and address unresolved pathway challenges through innovative ideas.
This round welcomes the first French company to Frontier’s portfolio. Paris-based PRONOE specializes in water-treatment systems that tackle CO2 emissions in the outflow of desalination plants and other coastal establishments.
The company’s van-sized water-treatment units plug directly into the outflow, where they release and dissolve a crushed limestone material into the plant’s seawater, creating an alkaline discharge that gets released into ocean water, where it helps fight acidification and boosts the CO2-absorbing capacity of the water.
One of the standout features of this process is the use of electricity to treat the outflow desalination brine and dissolve cheap limestone in it, avoiding lime calcination or the need for on-site CO2 storage.
This tweak, in turn, enables a low-emission, cost-effective alkaline water stream for ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) that doesn’t require additional expensive infrastructure to operate, making this approach a practical and scalable ocean CDR method that can be deployed to many more locations.
Cella is the second prepurchase recipient in this round and a recurring CDR supplier for Frontier.
The American company is working on in-situ carbon mineralization (ISM) in deep underground basalt formations, where the captured CO2 is converted into durable mineral carbonates.
Relevant: Sirona Technologies And Cella Launch Jacaranda DAC Project In Kenya
This CDR technology comes with minimized water use and simplified operations and can be combined with a wide range of capture solutions.
Additionally, Cella’s ISM approach offers outstanding CDR durability and unlocks many more locations as suitable for geologic storage, signaling strong scaling potential that could deliver gigatonne carbon removal results.
The prepurchase support from Frontier will fuel Cella’s work on a second injection well that will expand the CO2 injection volume capacity at a Kenyan Direct Air Capture (DAC) demonstration hub in development, which will also provide real-world data for the optimization of injection performance and permanence and their regulatory needs.
Read more: Frontier Backs Three CDR Startups In Its Fifth Prepurchasing Round
