Carbon removal buyer coalition Frontier announced its first large-scale offtake deal, a $53 million agreement with startup Charm Industrial to capture and permanently store 112,000 tons of CO2 underground.

Launched in April 2022 with $925 million in commitments by tech companies Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify and Meta and global management consulting firm McKinsey, Frontier is an advance market commitment to buy permanent carbon removal, aimed at accelerating the development of carbon removal technologies with guarantees of future demand. In addition to setting a demand pool for carbon removal, Frontier also vets suppliers, with a focus on solutions with the potential to achieve high volume and low cost.

The coalition announced four new members last month, including Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, and Workday, bringing the group’s total commitments to over $1 billion.

According to the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate change mitigation study released last year, scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C include carbon dioxide removal methods scaling to billions of tons of removal annually over the coming decades. The report also noted, however, that while there are multiple existing solutions to capture and store CO2, most are early stage and currently limited in scale.

Charm began operations in 2021, using plants to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, collecting agricultural residue from harvests or forest fire management, converting the biomass into bio-oil through pyrolysis, and pumping the bio-oil underground in EPA-regulated wells, where it sinks and solidifies in place.

Charm Industrial CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt said:

“An offtake, especially one of this size, lets us move meaningfully faster than we’d otherwise be able to, accelerating essentially all aspects of our technology and operations. Frontier has been an incredibly rigorous buyer, testing and pushing our limits across science, operations, engineering, finance, and our future cost curves.”

Under the new agreement, Charm will remove 112,000 tons of CO2 between 2024 and 2030 on behalf of Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability, Autodesk, H&M Group, and Workday. Through a partnership between Frontier and climate solutions platform Watershed, companies including Aledade, Boom Supersonic, Canva, SKIMS, Wise, and Zendesk will also participate with purchases.

Nan Ransohoff, Head of Climate at Strip and Head of Frontier, said:

“In just three years, Charm Industrial has gone from concept to permanently removing thousands of tons of CO₂. They’ve charted a feasible path to high-volume, low-cost carbon removal, and set the bar for executing with speed and rigor.”

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