This week, the Frontier advance market commitment announced that it has signed prepurchase agreements with three carbon dioxide removal (CDR) companies, investing a total of $1.75 million in carbon credits from these early-stage suppliers.
One of the companies that piqued Frontier’s interest and locked in a deal is Limenet, an Italy-based startup that secured $500,000 in this prepurchase round.
Founded merely two years ago, Limenet set out to address the issue of ocean alkalinity through a technology that turns CO2 into calcium bicarbonates in a process that combines lime and seawater.
It took the company only 18 months to advance from ideas to an operational facility in Italy, dubbed as one of the largest worldwide, where CO2 gets stored in seawater in the form of bicarbonates.
The final product generated through Limenet’s operations is a clear pH-equilibrated bicarbonate solution that gets safely stored in the ocean water, where it will remain chemically stable for millennia. This ecologically forward approach maintains the same pH level in the output and input ocean water, preventing pH fluctuations that could cause damage to marine ecosystems.
To track the CDR in this process, the company relies on advanced industrial sensors that provide real-time, precise calculation, offering a high-quality CDR solution based on direct measurement rather than predictive models.
Last year, the company’s operations covered only the final, ocean storage part of this process, but currently, Limenet is gearing up to also venture into direct air capture (DAC) that would enable the passive mineralization of lime.
To that end, it’s developing a custom electric kiln that will produce zero-carbon quicklime, eliminating the dependence on third-party lime providers and creating a sustainable feedstock for a number of scalable CDR approaches like surficial mineralization, ocean liming, and mineral looping DAC.
Ever since its market debut in 2023, Limenet has positioned itself as a fast-advancing, innovative carbon removal company, and this momentum brought the company’s work to Frontier’s attention.
Limenet founder and CEO Stefano Cappello explains that the journey to the secured prepurchase deal started three years ago, when his company first approached Frontier as a market actor that is aiming to catalyze different CDR approaches.
Since then, Limenet has been making strides and maturing as a company, pinning down its exact value proposition for the market. Cappello credits the deal with Frontier happening now and not earlier exactly to this gradual company fortification, during which Limenet took the time to dive deeper into sector dynamics and better understand its own technology and selling points, aligning operations with strict scientific criteria.
Relevant: Frontier Backs Three CDR Startups In Its Fifth Prepurchasing Round
Talking to Carbon Herald, Cappello shares, “Frontier is extremely selective for projects with a strong background in science and in execution, and also in stakeholder engagement. I’m really happy that we invested so much time and means in improving our science background and our stakeholder engagement, and I believe we did it right. Frontier was asking us to do this pre-purchase, and we were able to sell to them.”
The funding secured through the pre-purchase will enable Limenet to speed up its industrial plan, focused on a demonstration facility in Italy that will serve to prove the feasibility of its lime-centered approach.
This facility and the scientific studies that will come out from its work will provide the blueprint for constructing a tenfold bigger plant by 2028 in a location yet to be decided by the company.
For Limenet, the agreement with the prominent Frontier buyers brings not only a financial boost but also a bump up in credibility, as the company was able to successfully pass the coalition’s stringent due diligence process.
As Cappello shares, the achievement of being the first Southern European CDR company to partner with Frontier is a proud and motivating moment for Limenet, one that is guaranteed to improve the company’s credibility in the eyes of its current and future investors, institutions, and relevant stakeholders.
Over time, the CEO hopes that this pre-purchase deal will grow into a long-term collaboration with Frontier, as his company works on overcoming the challenge of decarbonizing lime—a breakthrough that would have a positive impact on a broader realm of the carbon removal sector.
Cappello points out that ocean-based solutions have a strong scaling potential, offering both CO2 capture and storage in the same environment.
While the issues of permits, funding, and new investors still need to be addressed, and MRV should be improved, especially as the field of AI advances, in the long run, ocean carbon removal could present a cost-effective climate tool for delivering impactful CDR while addressing the issue of ocean acidification.
This, Cappello says, is what makes this field worth investing in, and in the following decade, he expects to see numerous new startups entering this industry, developing novel decarbonization approaches.
