We’ve Never Seen a Carbon-Removal Plan Like This Before

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.

This idea—that by committing to buy a product early, you can help bring it to market faster —was first pioneered in the field of medicine. In 2010, a set of donors committed $1.5 billion to buy doses of a vaccine for Streptococcus pneumoniae before it had been invented. That “advanced market commitment,” as it’s called, spurred the rapid invention ... See more

The goal, of course, is to eventually remove carbon at the cheapest per-ton price possible, but simply paying for efficiency is not necessarily the fastest way to get there. The history of American technology policy helps demonstrate why. In the 1950s and ’60s, the United States promised to purchase the fastest semiconductor from any company that c... See more