New investments from Frontier, a pioneering funder of carbon removal projects, focus on methods for capturing carbon dioxide emitted from wastewater and pulp-processing plants. The two methods have the potential to draw down hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide by integrating relatively well-understood technology into existing industrial facilities.
Frontier will pay $32 million to CREW, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York and New Haven, Connecticut, to remove almost 72,000 tons of CO2 from wastewater. The startup adds crushed limestone to treatment tanks, where it reacts with carbon in organic waste to form dissolved bicarbonate that then safely flows into rivers, oceans and soils.
A second startup — CO280, based in Vancouver, Canada — has developed technology for capturing the CO2 emitted during pulp and paper processing. Frontier will pay it $48 million to remove 224,500 tons of CO2. In both cases, the processes are carbon negative because the CO2 involved originated in the atmosphere. The company made its announcement Dec. 17.
“The common thread is using existing infrastructure to enable carbon removal rather than starting from scratch — an approach that will help shrink costs and grow scale in the relatively near term,” Randy Spock, carbon credits and removals lead at Google, wrote on LinkedIn. Google is one of the founders of Frontier, along with Stripe, Shopify and McKinsey Sustainability.
Global potential
The cost of the removals is high by voluntary carbon market standards: $447 and $214 per ton for the wastewater and pulp approaches, respectively. But Frontier was set up to provide off-take agreements to promising early-stage carbon removal companies, which use the funding to validate and scale their processes. Both approaches have the potential to fall below $100 per ton, Frontier said when announcing the funding.
The organization pointed to multiple advantages of the approaches being pursued by CREW and CO280. There are hundreds of paper and pulp facilities and 100,000 wastewater plants worldwide, providing the potential for each method to scale to 500 million tons of CO2 removal annually. CREW’s technology can also be used to capture carbon emitted by other industrial facilities, such as cement plants.
Since 2022, Frontier has committed to spending $454 million through agreements to purchase just over a million tons of removals. The founders and the organization’s newer members — Salesforce, Workday, H&M Group and J.P. Morgan Chase — have together committed to investing more than $1 billion.
