Today, we're committing an additional $915 million to accelerate the world's best carbon removal companies. Participating buyers include Stripe, Google, Shopify, Salesforce, H&M Group, and Anthropic. This new funding takes Frontier's total commitment to $1.8 billion.
Four years in, carbon removal has made a lot of progress. Hundreds of companies are being built, and tens of thousands of tons have been delivered. We have real-world data across most major pathways and growing confidence in which technologies could be a meaningful part of a gigaton-scale future. The major question now is whether demand will materialize at the magnitude required.
To get to gigaton-scale, companies and governments will need to work in concert. Policy takes years to develop, and governments are best served by a range of proven, derisked technologies. Corporate buyers bridge that gap, providing the reliable revenue companies need today to get their technologies to commercial scale.
With this in mind, we're focusing our additional funds on two priorities. On the supply side, we'll concentrate purchases on a narrower portfolio of companies where we have high conviction the technology has gigaton-scale potential. On the demand side, every deal will require a clear line of sight to robust, long-term demand, be it compliance markets, industrial regulation, or direct government procurement.
Progress so far
In 2022, we launched Frontier, an advance market commitment (AMC) to buy $1 billion of carbon removal by 2030. The AMC structure was borrowed from global health, where it was first used to accelerate the development of a pneumococcal vaccine for low- and middle-income countries. In the case of carbon removal, the goal was to spur innovation by sending a clear demand signal to researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors that there is a growing market for these technologies: build, and we will buy.
Four years in, the progress has been remarkable:
More companies across more commercial pathways: In 2022, there were a dozen or so companies trying to crack carbon removal; today, there are hundreds spanning more than 20 technology approaches. Frontier has diligenced over 500 of them. Frontier buyers signed the first commercial deals in enhanced rock weathering (ERW), inland water alkalinity enhancement (IWAE), ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), biomass injection, and waste-to-energy with carbon capture—paving the way for the commercialization of multiple new pathways.
Real deliveries and the beginning of scaled deployment: In 2025, seven portfolio companies delivered approximately 23,000 tons—roughly 2x the prior year—across most major approaches. They also broke ground on 1.4 million tons of new annual removal capacity. This year, Frontier portfolio companies are forecasting more than 50,000 tons removed: doubling once again year over year.
More buyers and policies: Since 2022, more than 350 new corporate buyers—across financial services, aviation, consumer retail, education, entertainment, and automotive sectors—have collectively purchased almost four million tons of carbon removal. Policy-driven demand in multiple jurisdictions is emerging: Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, the EU, Japan, the US, and Canada have all passed demand-side legislation.
Maturing measurement and verification infrastructure: In 2022, there were no third-party registries or protocols for permanent carbon removal technologies. Today, quality registries have enabled the first verified deliveries across all major removal pathways, including open-system approaches like ocean alkalinity enhancement and enhanced rock weathering.
The gigaton-scale portfolio is coming into focus
We've proven that carbon removal technology can work. The most important questions for each pathway are now how big it can get, how cheap it can get, and whether it can be deployed responsibly at scale. Surficial mineralization and ocean alkalinity enhancement have the potential to be huge and low cost, but outstanding technology risks mean large error bars on both metrics. Biomass-based approaches and enhanced rock weathering are capped in their scale potential and the cost of direct air capture is likely to remain relatively high, but these technologies are better understood and enjoy more existing policy support. Given the inherent trade-offs and competitive advantages across pathways, a portfolio at scale is likely.
Surficial mineralization: potential to scale to over 10 Gt per year (1-4 Gt per year on waste feedstock) at $80–$120 per ton. At 1 Gt per year, that's approximately four billion tons of rock moved annually, equivalent to around 5% of today's global mining operations. Likely deployment would be concentrated at a handful of megasites comparable in size to the world's largest mines. Today, the technology is still early, with limited real-world deployment data. Early pilots of this technology are expensive and cost reduction will only come through deploying at massive scale. Success in this pathway will require quick and creative small-scale demonstrations, followed by large mining companies marshaling investment for commercial-scale, purpose-built mining operations.
Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE): potential to scale to over 10 Gt per year using purpose-made alkalinity through limestone calcination (0.4 Gt on waste feedstock) at $70–$200 per ton. At 1 Gt per year, this is likely a combination of thousands of coastal outfalls and hundreds of custom cargo ships dispersing alkalinity in the open ocean, with limestone calcination requirements equivalent to around 15%–20% of the cement industry today. Reaching this scale will require advances in calcination technology to drive down costs, demonstration of minimal ecosystem risks, robust trustworthy ocean models that quantify removal, and novel engineering solutions for cost-effective open-ocean distribution. The core unit operations—calcination, shipping, and coastal discharge—are well-established industrial processes; the challenge is repurposing them for carbon removal.
Biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS), including bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and biomass and bio-oil injection: potential to scale to 1-5 Gt per year at $60–$200 per ton, assuming feedstock meets sustainable sourcing criteria and can be aggregated or accessed economically. At 1 Gt per year, this would require approximately 1,250 plants the size of Stockholm Exergi or 12,500 injection sites like the ones operated by Vaulted Deep. Because waste is highly distributed and different technologies perform better on different feedstocks, deployment will be inherently decentralized. But that also means that instead of building from scratch, BiCRS technologies can plug into existing waste management and energy infrastructure, and benefit from robust existing government support.
Enhanced rock weathering (ERW): potential to scale to around 1-2 Gt per year at $75–$200 per ton, with scale limited by the overlap between access to feedstock and cropland. At 1 Gt per year, this would require around four billion tons of rock from approximately 200 quarries to be crushed and spread on roughly one billion acres (28% of global cropland). Reaching this scale requires millions of farmers to switch from conventional lime to crushed waste rock to manage soil pH—attractive because crushed rock could be more accessible and likely cheaper (subsidized by carbon revenue). It also calls for moving from direct soil measurements to modeled quantification without sacrificing rigor.
Direct air capture (DAC): potential to scale to over 10 Gt per year at $200–$300 per ton. At 1 Gt per year, assuming DAC requires 2 MWh/tCO₂, this scale requires 2,000 TWh of clean energy, around 6% of the global electricity produced annually today. Reaching this scale is most limited by access to capital to fund expensive deployments today, followed by access to low-cost, carbon-free energy and CO₂ storage. For DAC to make up a meaningful part of the portfolio, this technology needs to see significant energy-efficiency breakthroughs that bend the cost curve or strong corporate and government preference for "closed-system" pathways, or both.
Over the last four years, we've seen that real-world deployment drives the most learning about a pathway's potential. We're narrowing in on the most promising approaches and crossing off others as we go. Read more about what we've learned in our overview of the field's progress and in our purchasing perspectives.
Policy is taking shape
At gigaton scale, the carbon removal market will require hundreds of billions of dollars in annual procurement. This is large, but not unprecedented: the world spends $1.22 trillion on waste management and $540 billion on agricultural subsidies.
For carbon removal, this funding will most likely come from a patchwork of policies that vary based on the political reality, community dynamics, and project types in a given jurisdiction. Most demand-side policies will fall into one of three buckets: (i) compliance markets that will create demand for carbon removal to neutralize any residual emissions (e.g., emissions trading schemes); (ii) expanding existing industrial regulations to include carbon removal practices (e.g., mandating the use of limestone in wastewater treatment plants); or (iii) direct funding of removal activities (e.g., federal procurement or tax subsidies).
Regardless of policy mechanism, building demand at this level will require confidence in the technology and broad public support. That will rely on voters across many jurisdictions seeing local benefits, including jobs, community improvement, and more.
What needs to happen next
To build the conditions for robust, long-term demand, several things need to happen:
Get more corporate buyers to bring the highest-potential technologies to market. Voluntary market buyers remain key to pushing the best technology out of the lab, into the field, and to commercial scale. Their early purchases will have a compounding impact: technologies deployed today are much more likely to reach the required scale tomorrow.
Scale a handful of great projects with a combination of private and public demand. The next 5-10 years are key to demonstrating how public-private partnerships can accelerate carbon removal technology to scale and bring benefits to local communities. These examples will lay the groundwork for the policies needed to create long-term demand, which must scale from single-digit billions of dollars in the mid-2030s to hundreds of billions by 2050.
Validate emerging pathways with even stronger cost or scale profiles. The world is likely going to need a portfolio of carbon removal technologies to get to gigaton scale. Four years in, new and promising approaches are still emerging (e.g., surficial mineralization). We will continue to scout and fund fresh ideas with paradigm-altering potential.
Ensure large-scale deployments are safe and responsible. As these pathways start to deploy at scale, the field must continue to hold a high bar for what responsible procurement looks like. To that end, we've published responsible procurement principles and ecosystem impact rubrics for marine carbon removal, enhanced rock weathering, and BiCRS, as well as clean energy procurement principles for DAC and our approach to working with local communities.
The Growth AMC
The original AMC was designed to catalyze innovation and get carbon removal off the starting line. The Growth AMC is designed to push the best companies to the scale that enables robust, long-term demand. Its core elements are:
Approximately 10–15 focused bets through 8- to 10-year offtakes to get projects to final investment decision (FID) at commercial scale. We are set up to buy a significant share of a company's available capacity, and contract out as far as 2040. Because contracts will be larger and longer on average, we expect the portfolio to be more concentrated. Deals will include both new companies and existing high-performing portfolio companies.
Line-of-sight to robust, long-term demand in the near term. We'll prioritize projects with a credible theory for how policies will cover the cost of tons delivered by the time our contracts expire. This means we'll favor jurisdictions where meaningful carbon removal policy has passed or is likely to. Where possible, we will collaborate directly with governments to stack public funding and private sector offtakes to get projects to FID.
Continued funding for the best new carbon removal ideas. We will continue to support high-potential breakthrough ideas and the fundamental science to unblock pathway progress through prepurchases, smaller offtakes, and R&D grants.
If you're a buyer or policymaker interested in joining this effort, please email info@frontierclimate.com.