Tech Giants Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, McKinsey and Shopify Pledge $925M for Carbon Capture and Storage

An aerial view of the GECO Project’s Hellisheiði Geothermal Power Plant in Iceland. It aims to improve the efficiency of pre-existing gas capture and injection infrastructure. A major carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, named Orca, began operating at the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant site in September 2021. Claimed to be the world’s biggest direct air CCS plant, Orca utilizes geothermal energy generated by the Hellisheiði facility to perform CCS operations.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Carbfix

Some of the world's largest companies will spend $925 million buying offsets from startups that remove carbon dioxide from the air, reports Bloomberg and The Atlantic.

The Frontier fund, a public-benefit corporation owned by Stripe Inc., has also received funding from Alphabet Inc., Shopify Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and McKinsey & Co. Inc. It will help fledgling carbon-removal companies scale up and reduce the cost of withdrawing each ton of CO₂ from the air, which would benefit all companies in the world looking to buy high-quality offsets.

Climate scientists are clear that every company in the world has to cut emissions first, whether that be through moving to renewable power or other carbon-free alternatives. But the process of reducing emissions has been delayed so much that it won’t be possible to meet global climate goals without removing some of the CO₂ already dumped in the air. Offset purchases made by large companies to deal with emissions it cannot cut, such as those from air travel, could create the business model that will support carbon removal.