A Start-Up’s Unusual Plan to Suck Carbon Out of the Sky

Stripe—and now Frontier—aims to be a “buyer of first resort,” sending a demand-side signal to entrepreneurs and investors that a large market for permanent carbon removal exists.

Banks and investors tend to be uncertain about lending to carbon-removal companies that want to build a facility to test their ideas, Ransohoff said. But with an offtake agreement from Frontier, a carbon-removal start-up can prove to a bank that it will have a customer once the facility is up and running.

The business model envisions that polluters will collect the carbon—and the tax credit—and then pay Bayou Bend a transport-and-disposal fee that Tiller says is likely to be $20 to $25 per ton.

Carbon dioxide removal may be essential; it’s already built into the calculations of the IPCC. Under the current order, however, it’s also economically infeasible. How do you go about creating a $100 billion industry for a product no one wants to buy? The eggplants and the Snack-Gurken represented an admittedly jury-rigged solution. By selling its

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Several of the big players have announced recently that they are turning carbon neutral, including Google, Facebook, and BCG. The most audacious strategies even provide a way to turn climate positive (i.e. removing more CO₂ than they emit).

The new subsidy, modeled broadly on ones for renewable energy, gave developers a credit topping out at $50 for every ton of waste carbon dioxide they captured and geologically stored.