Narrator: Around the world, scientists and entrepreneurs
are finding promising new ways to remove carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere and ocean
in order to curb the effects of climate change.
Why?
-: To avoid the worst effects of climate change,
it won't be enough to just reduce emissions.
We'll also need to permanently remove huge amounts of CO2
already in the atmosphere and oceans.
Five to 10 billion tons per year by 2050.
While we have some ways to remove carbon,
such as reforestation and soil carbon sequestration,
these solutions are unlikely to scale
to the size of the problem.
We need a gigaton scale portfolio
of permanent carbon removal solutions.
Narrator: Luckily new approaches, like kelp forests,
bio oil injection and direct to air capture
are just a few of the exciting innovations underway.
But so far they've all faced the same problem,
they have no customers.
New technologies like solar panels, hard drives
and DNA sequencing tend to be expensive at the start,
but costs come down over time as they scale.
Carbon removal is at the beginning of a similar trajectory,
and because it's expensive today,
most companies would rather buy low-cost alternatives.
The problem is, without customers,
these technologies can't scale to reduce their costs.
Not only that, but investors don't want to invest
in companies if it's unclear that anybody will buy
what they're selling.
So without customers and investment,
the carbon removal ecosystem has been a bit stuck.
Frontier is a new initiative planning to spend
a billion dollars buying carbon removal
over the next nine years.
It's a simple idea.
By guaranteeing future demand for these technologies now,
we hope to help them scale up and get cheaper, faster.
-: There's actually lots of capital.
There's lots of excitement and interest in climate.
There's lots of people who wanna work on it.
But there's not a lot of buyers out there
who are actually willing to put down the money to say,
okay, go put the carbon underground.
Narrator: We've seen this cycle before.
-: In the mid-2000s, poorer countries lacked access
to the pneumococcal vaccine.
Pharma companies weren't motivated to spend the resources
developing the vaccine because they were unsure
there'd be enough demand to recoup their costs.
In 2009, governments and philanthropists pledged
to spend $1.5 billion to subsidize the purchase
of the pneumococcal vaccine
if the pharmaceutical companies could produce it
at a low enough cost.
Hundreds of millions of vaccine doses were purchased
and distributed throughout the world,
accelerating the vaccine rollout by five years,
and saving an estimated 700,000 lives.
Narrator: This model, guaranteeing demand
to accelerate the development of a new product,
is called an Advance Market Commitment, or an AMC.
The idea is to send a signal to researchers, entrepreneurs
and investors that there will be a big market
for their technologies.
In other words, start building.
AMCs worked for vaccines, and we think they can work
for carbon removal too.
Here's how Frontier works.
Buyers decide how much they want to spend on carbon removal
and pool their commitments through Frontier.
Frontier's team of technical and commercial experts find
and vet suppliers to identify
the most promising technologies,
and then facilitate purchases between buyers and suppliers,
either upfront or through offtake agreements.
-: Once we have a guaranteed buyer, then we can secure
the financing to build our next plant, we can grow our team
and attract the investment that we need to scale.
Narrator: Finally, as carbon removal is delivered,
suppliers are paid and tons of carbon removal
are passed back to buyers.
Over the next nine years,
Frontier's members will spend nearly $1 billion
buying permanent carbon removal.
On the one hand, it's a lot of money,
around 30 times what's been spent to date.
On the other hand, it's less than 1%
of what we need to spend every year by 2050.
So there's a long way to go.
And our hope is that more buyers will join Frontier
in the months and years ahead.
But our message to the carbon removal world today
is loud and clear:
Build and we will buy.