Meta, Alphabet, Shopify Pledge Nearly $1 Billion For Carbon Removal Project

The world’s technology giants, including Alphabet, Meta, McKinsey, Shopify, and Stripe, have pledged to commit US$925 million to project Frontier, aimed at funding developing technologies that could remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Companies in Frontier are essentially promising to purchase permanent carbon removal solutions created over the next nine years, thus showing researchers and investors that there is a growing demand in the carbon removal space.

According to Interesting Engineering, early-stage suppliers in the project that develop novel ideas will be funded by low-volume pre-purchase agreements, with Frontier acting as the middleman between buyers and creators who wish to commercialize their eco-friendly solutions.

In order to identify which ideas are worth investing in, the project leaders will consider a series of factors, such as a solution’s permanence, physical footprint, cost, capacity, and environmental justice.

As per Environmental Leader, the organization hopes to find innovations that will store carbon for over 1,000 years, take advantage of carbon sinks that don’t involve the use of arable land, and can eventually be scaled to cost less than US$100 a ton.

This commitment from the world’s leading industry players could signify a large step forward, especially as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that six billion tons of carbon needs to be removed annually by 2050 to reach the 1.5°C target set forth by the Paris Climate Agreement. 

[via Interesting Engineering and Environmental Leader, cover image via VanderWolfImages | Dreamstime.com]