Carbon removal buyer coalition Frontier announced that it has facilitated a new set of carbon removal agreements totaling more than $58 million with biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) provider Vaulted Deep, on behalf of a group of corporate buyers that include Stripe, Alphabet, McKinsey, H&M and JPMorgan Chase, among others.

Under the new agreements, Vaulted Deep will remove and permanently store more than 152,000 tons of CO2 through 2027, including over 18,000 tons this year.

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 agreement with Vaulted Deep is Frontier’s largest offtake deal to date. Frontier buyers were also Vaulted Deep’s first customers, through a 1,666 ton agreement in September 2023, which has already been completed and verified.

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.

Spun out of injection well-focused waste management company Advantek last year, Vaulted Deep sequesters sludgy organic wastes, including biosolids, manure, agricultural, food waste, and paper sludge, and injects the carbon-rich biomass deep underground for permanent storage. The company’s approach starts with plants that naturally draw down CO₂ from the atmosphere via photosynthesis that ends up in the form of biomass would otherwise be incinerated, landfilled, or spread on land, which would re-release the CO2 back into the atmosphere. Vaulted Deep turns the waste into a carbon-rich slurry, and utilizes a proprietary slurry injection technology to inject the carbon deep underground, offering 10,000+ year permanence.

According to Vaulted Deep, its carbon removal approach includes additional benefits, including the potential to scale significantly, given an abundance of waste and flexible storage options, a line of sight to under $100 cost per ton, existing, permitted well infrastructure and expertise in deep well waste injection technology from Advantek, and health and environmental benefits from avoiding the incineration or spreading on land for disposal of the biomass.

Julia Reichelstein, CEO at Vaulted Deep, said:

“Vaulted’s technology, developed by Advantek, has been primed to address carbon removal for decades, even before there was a market. Technologies like ours that can scale quickly without compromising durability or quality will lead the way. Our proven CDR is what makes possible Frontier’s largest offtake to date.”

The new agreements include purchases by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability, Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, and Workday. Additionally, through a partnership between Frontier and climate solutions platform Watershed, companies including Aledade, Skyscanner, Canva, SKIMS, Wise, and Zendesk have also participated in the purchases. The agreements also include options to purchase more tons from future projects at lower prices.

According to Vaulted Deep, the new agreements will enable the company to commission three new wells that are sited to optimize feedstock availability, transportation, and well capacity.

Hannah Bebbington, Strategy Lead at Frontier, said:

“Vaulted went from inception to delivering thousands of tons in just four months and is now among the first carbon removal companies to sign a multi-million dollar offtake agreement. This shows what’s possible when the expertise of traditional industry players is repurposed for carbon removal.”