Frontier has published key takeaways from its latest funding round for carbon removal and observations it made from its purchase cycles. According to its announcement, Frontier’s members Shopify and Stripe will spend a combined $11 million for carbon removal, as part of a commitment in April to spend $925 million on permanent carbon removal by the end of 2030.
The carbon removal purchases are from the following projects – Arbor, Captura, Carbin Minerals, Carbon To Stone, Cella, CREW and Inplanet. Additionally, Stripe has provided $500,000 in R&D grants to Kodama Systems and Nitricity.
Relevant: Frontier Issues Request For Proposals For Second Round Of Carbon Removal Purchases
Frontier shares that its latest carbon removal funding round this fall had twice as many applications as it did during its first cycle six months ago. Applications spanned more than 10 different carbon removal pathways – from direct ocean capture to direct air capture coupled with alkaline material mineralization, biomass burial, and integrating carbon storage into clean fertilizer production.
Some projects are taking on research and technical gaps like exploring enhanced weathering in tropical soils or advancing the development of CO2 mineralization in underground basalt formations.
Frontier acknowledges new permanent storage sinks pathways from applications it received. New approaches include combining direct air capture with alkaline materials (e.g., steel slag) to produce carbonates that can be used in building materials as well as containerized rock weathering that can use impure CO2 streams as an input.
Relevant: Alphabet, Stripe And Others To Buy $925M Of Carbon Offsets
Companies are also trying to use the waste streams of existing industrial processes for carbon removal. They are attempting to use mine tailings, steel slag, flue gas from organic waste incineration, biomass waste from forest thinning, or brine from desalination plants.
They can use these resources that are low in cost to store CO2. An example is – instead of decomposing, organic waste could be turned to biochar so that the CO2 it contains is stored, or it could be burned for energy with the emissions captured to reduce its environmental impact.
Stripe also announced it awarded a research and development grant to explore the effectiveness of burying biomass from forest thinning operations, as a potential pathway for maximizing carbon removal efficiency.
