Climate Tech Firms Get $80 Million to Pull Carbon From Paper Mills, Sewage Plant

Google, H&M, Stripe, and other members of the climate-focused Frontier coalition will buy $80 million of carbon credits from firms using innovative technologies to capture emissions from industrial processes. These purchases include capturing emissions from paper mills using oil industry technology and from sewage plants using rocks.

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While U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is expected to withdraw from a deal to cap global warming and cut support for carbon capture, companies in sectors including tech and finance continue to back efforts to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Unlike efforts to use natural solutions to lock climate-damaging emissions, such as planting trees, many tech-heavy fixes are still in their early stages and far from achieving the scale required to remove billions of tons of CO2 annually.

To help bring down costs, Frontier agrees to buy credits from firms with technologies it believes can eventually achieve a cost of $100 per ton or less. In its latest deals, Frontier announced on Tuesday that buyers had agreed to pay $48 million, or $214 per metric ton, for credits representing 224,500 metric tons of emissions between 2028 and 2030 from project developer CO280.Additionally, $32.1 million, or $447 per ton, will be paid for 71,878 tons of emissions reductions from New Haven, Connecticut-based startup CREW.

CO280 is applying carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology owned by oil field services company SLB to the smokestack of a paper mill. This process captures carbon initially absorbed by the trees used to produce the paper.

CREW, on the other hand, integrates carbon-attracting limestone into water at municipal wastewater treatment plants. By monitoring CO2 levels before and after treatment, they calculate how much CO2 has been captured.

"It's a version of a much-discussed process to capitalize on some rocks' natural tendency to capture CO2," Frontier said.

Hannah Bebbington, head of deployment at Frontier, emphasized the significance of retrofitting older industries with modern carbon removal technologies. "We are really excited about the possibility for large industrial players to integrate carbon removal technologies and start to deliver carbon removal cheaply and at scale," she said.

These deals underscore the commitment of Frontier coalition members to invest in technologies capable of addressing climate change challenges while fostering innovation in carbon capture solutions.