An advance market commitment to accelerate carbon removal

Frontier is an advance market commitment to buy an initial $1B+ of permanent carbon removal between 2022 and 2030. It was founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, McKinsey and tens of thousands of businesses using Stripe Climate.

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Founding members

StripeAlphabetShopifyMetaMcKinsey

How Frontier works

Frontier is an advance market commitment (AMC) that aims to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies by guaranteeing future demand for them. The goal is to send a strong demand signal to researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors that there is a growing market for these technologies. Importantly, Frontier aims to help create net new carbon removal supply rather than compete over what exists today.

In practice, its team of technical and commercial experts facilitates purchases from high-potential carbon removal companies on behalf of buyers. There are a variety of ways that buyers can participate in Frontier to help us further increase demand and spur new supply.” The highlighted text will link to the new Participate page.

The concept of an AMC is borrowed from vaccine development and was piloted a decade ago. The first AMC accelerated the development of pneumococcal vaccines for low-income countries, saving an estimated 700,000 lives.

While the market dynamics of carbon removal and vaccines are not identical, they face similar challenges: uncertainty about long-term demand and unproven technologies. AMCs have the power to send a strong and immediate demand signal without picking winning technologies at the start.

Overview of how Frontier works

Illustrative only

Buyer

$300M

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$200M

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$100M

Frontier

Acts on behalf of buyers and suppliers

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𝑥 tons at $400/ton

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𝑥 tons at $300/ton

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1 | Frontier aggregates demand to set an annual maximum spend

Buyers decide how much they want to spend on carbon removal each year between 2022 and 2030. Frontier aggregates commitments to set a total annual demand pool. Suppliers apply for consideration as part of regular RFP processes.

2 | Frontier vets suppliers and facilitates carbon removal purchases

For early-stage suppliers, agreements will likely take the form of low-volume prepurchases. For larger suppliers ready to scale, Frontier will facilitate offtake agreements to purchase future tons of carbon removal at an agreed price if and when delivered.

3 | Suppliers remove carbon and pass tons back to buyers

When tons of carbon are removed, suppliers get paid. In the case of offtake agreements, tons are issued back to buyers.

Focusing on scalable, permanent solutions

We look for permanent carbon removal solutions that have the potential to be low-cost and high-volume in the future, even if they’re not today. Specifically, Frontier will focus on technologies that meet the following criteria:

CriteriaDescription
DurabilityStores carbon permanently (>1,000 years)
Physical footprintTakes advantage of carbon sinks and sources that do not compete for arable land
CostHas a path to being affordable at scale (<$100 per ton)
CapacityHas a path to being a meaningful part of the carbon removal solution portfolio (>0.5 gigatons per year)
Net negativityMaximizes net removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide
AdditionalityResults in net new carbon removed, rather than taking credit for removal that was already going to occur
VerifiabilityHas a path to using scientifically rigorous and transparent methods for monitoring and verification
Safety and legalityIs working towards the highest standards of safety, compliance, and local environmental outcomes; actively mitigates risks and negative environmental and other externalities on an ongoing basis

Learn more about Frontier

Hear from scientists, entrepreneurs, and economists working on carbon removal.

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Carbon removal needs a bold assist

To avoid the worst effects of climate change, most climate models agree it won’t be enough to just reduce emissions. We’ll also need to permanently remove gigatons of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere and ocean.

While we have some ways to capture carbon, such as planting trees or soil carbon sequestration, these solutions alone are unlikely to scale to the size of the problem.

In short, we need a gigaton-scale portfolio of new and permanent carbon removal solutions.

While carbon removal has made significant progress over the past few years, it’s still not at all on track to get to the required scale. As of 2021, less than 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide had been permanently removed from the atmosphere by new technologies—1 million times short of the annual scale needed.

Carbon removal needs a bold assist. An AMC can give the industry the confidence to begin building, and to do so with urgency.

Path to limit global temperature increase to 1.5°C

Limit global temperature increase to:

Historical emissions~1.5°C path~3°C (Current path)
Net CO₂ emissions (GtCO₂/yr)
50403020100-10-20
Year
1980199020002010202020302040205020602070208020902100
Carbon emissionsCarbon removalNet CO₂ emissionsCurrent path
Carbon removal needed to limit global temperature increase to 1.5°C
Historical Emissions via Global Carbon Project¹, "Current path" shows SSP4-6.0²³, removal pathways adapted from CICERO⁴. For simplicity this chart only shows CO₂, though the modeled scenarios account for other greenhouse gas emissions, all of which will need to be reduced.

Who we are

50+

Technical reviewers

Our network of top technical experts help us evaluate the most promising approaches.

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Members and partners

A growing list of companies are joining Frontier to buy permanent carbon removal.

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Advisors

We’re advised by a multidisciplinary group of industry experts.

Learn more

Q&A

How many tons of removal will Frontier members buy?
We don’t know yet. Frontier will target technologies that are high quality and have the greatest long-term potential, rather than what is cheap today. For that reason, we don’t know in advance how many tons we’ll be able to buy, or what the price per ton will be. We’re committed to transparency as we begin purchasing tons.
Do buyers get a return?
No. Frontier will facilitate purchases of carbon removal on behalf of buyers. It won’t make or facilitate equity investments at this time.
Can additional companies buy through Frontier?
Yes, we’ve designed Frontier to encourage other companies to participate. Learn about your options to participate.
How is Frontier governed?
Frontier is a public benefit LLC wholly owned by Stripe Inc. It is run by a dedicated team of technical and commercial experts, led by Nan Ransohoff, on behalf of buyers. Frontier founders serve on the Founder Advisory Board, which oversees the high-level objectives of Frontier’s activities. Frontier is also advised by a multidisciplinary group of industry experts.

Citations

  1. Global Carbon Project. FF&I Emissions: Gilfillan, D., Marland, G., Boden, T. and Andres, R.: Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO₂ Emissions, available at: https://energy.appstate.edu/CDIAC, last access: 27 September 2019. Land-use change emissions: Average of two bookkeeping models: Houghton, R. A. and Nassikas, A. A.: Global and regional fluxes of carbon from land use and land cover change 1850-2015, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 31, 456-472, 2017; Hansis, E., Davis, S. J., and Pongratz, J.: Relevance of methodological choices for accounting of land use change carbon fluxes, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 29, 1230-1246, 2015.
  2. SSP Public Database (Version 2.0) https://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at/SspDb. SSP4: Katherine Calvin, Ben Bond-Lamberty, Leon Clarke, James Edmonds, Jiyong Eom, Corinne Hartin, Sonny Kim, Page Kyle, Robert Link, Richard Moss, Haewon McJeon, Pralit Patel, Steve Smith, Stephanie Waldhoff, Marshall Wise, The SSP4: A world of deepening inequality, Global Environmental Change, Volume 42, 2017, Pages 284-296, SSN 0959-3780.
  3. Hausfather, Z., & Peters, G. P. (2020). Emissions – the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3
  4. Peters, G. (2018, September 4). Stylised pathways to “well below 2°C.” CICERO. https://cicero.oslo.no/en/articles/stylised-pathways-to-well-below-2c