We are inviting applications to Frontier's 2026 Innovation program targeting novel carbon removal approaches and last-mile challenges in ocean alkalinity enhancement, surficial mineralization, and open-system MRV.
Three years ago, we cataloged over 100 research and innovation gaps across durable carbon removal pathways. Since then, the field has moved fast, making significant progress on more than 60% of them. New companies have broken ground, academic teams have answered hard research questions, and NGOs have established the first shared frameworks for measurement and verification. Carbon removal is no longer just a lab science; it is moving into real-world deployment.
However, several gaps remain that are holding back some of the most promising pathways like ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) and surficial mineralization. With more targeted funding, we believe these challenges are solvable in the not-so-distant future. To that end, we’re evolving our approach to early-stage funding (our “prepurchase program”) in two ways: (1) we’re expanding beyond prepurchases of carbon removal tons to also explicitly fund R&D in critical areas, and (2) to support that, our range of check sizes will be more flexible.
How the field matured: From early hypotheses to empirical evidence
As carbon removal shifts from lab to field, the economic and physical limits of some approaches are becoming clearer. Deployment data has exposed instances where early models were too optimistic. Some examples of field learnings include:
Cold weather meaningfully impacts the performance of some DAC approaches: Modeling and field data revealed that cold weather significantly impairs capture efficiency. This impact is most pronounced for liquid-based systems, where cold air slows the chemical reaction between CO₂ and the solvent and significant energy is required to prevent components from freezing. However, solid sorbent systems are not immune—they also experience efficiency drops as cold temperatures slow how quickly the sorbent captures CO₂. This limits the use of liquid-based DAC to moderate climates or seasonal operation rather than year-round deployment.
Some biological approaches to durable carbon removal are less promising: Approaches pursuing macroalgae (kelp) sinking and engineered biopolymers—genetically modified plants designed to produce "rot-proof" shells—hit cost and durability challenges. In the ocean, research has shown that large-scale kelp farming could absorb nutrients necessary for other marine life, and that once the algae reaches the seafloor, it often decomposes, depleting oxygen and releasing CO₂ back into the water that can slowly remix back to upper ocean layers. On land, Living Carbon's sporopollenin project demonstrated that programming plants to grow hardened molecules to lock away CO₂ is often a dead end: the energy and land required to build these materials are too high to be economical.
There are meaningful economic tradeoffs to using waste feedstocks and creating coproducts: While using industrial wastes as a feedstock provides a low-cost input, it can involve a heavy counterfactual burden. Proving the baseline—what would have happened to that waste in the absence of the project—introduces measurement and verification complexity and eats into project margins. We've also seen challenges when projects rely on selling coproducts, such as hydrogen, to lower the cost of carbon removal. If a project only survives when the price of the coproduct is high, the cost of carbon removal will be volatile and its scale capped by the size of that secondary market.
Conversely, several fundamental questions from 2022 have been derisked by positive deployment data or better tools:
Adding alkalinity to the ocean is a net sink: In OAE, the CO₂ drawdown happens through air molecules flowing out of the atmosphere and into the surface water in the ocean—a process known as "air-sea gas exchange." A major unknown in 2022 was whether this exchange could occur fast enough to ensure that adding alkalinity actually results in a net removal from the atmosphere, rather than just changing the chemistry of the water. Deployment data from Planetary and modeling work from Dalhousie University, [C]worthy, and other groups demonstrated that, with appropriate site selection, the atmosphere predictably replenishes the ocean's carbon deficit. In 2025, Planetary delivered the world's first verified OAE credits.
Weathering kinetics are commercially viable: In 2022, we did not know if rocks could weather fast enough to matter on a human timescale. Data from early enhanced weathering (EW) projects now confirm that with the right choice of feedstock and preprocessing of the rock, meaningful weathering occurs within the first few years of a project, rather than taking decades. The field is still refining how to distinguish the weathering signal from the background soil noise in an economically feasible way. Nonetheless, we are more confident that reaction rates are viable for commercial-scale removal.
The "unmeasurable" is now being verified: In 2022, measuring carbon removal in open systems like ocean or farm soils relied on a wild west of early methodologies. Since then, the field has moved from debate to actual delivery. While biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) companies like Charm Industrial and Vaulted Deep paved the way with first deliveries from "closed" systems in 2023 and 2024, the scope of what we can reliably measure expanded significantly in 2025. This was the year companies delivered the first verified tons from complex "open" systems: OAE (certified via the Isometric protocol) and enhanced weathering (using the Cascade Foundations framework).
Target innovation areas we're funding in 2026
Despite rapid progress, some of the most promising pathways are still held back by specific technical hurdles. We are focusing our 2026 R&D grants and prepurchases on these challenges:
Increasing mineralization efficiency for large volumes of rocks: We are increasingly confident that surficial mineralization—the conversion of CO₂ to carbonates via reaction with alkaline rock—has a path to deliver gigaton-scale carbon removal at low cost. We are looking for the best ways to increase the efficiency of surficial mineralization at a large scale. This includes designing rock pile architectures that deliver air into the center of million-ton deposits, more reactive mineral pretreatment, and new ways to source the raw material itself.
Determining how to add more alkalinity to the ocean efficiently and safely: We have proven that we can add alkalinity to the ocean without harm provided safety thresholds are respected, but we don't yet know the precise chemical thresholds that would cause alkalinity to precipitate and sink before it removes CO₂. We are looking for field-based empirical studies that characterize chemistry in the near-field mixing zone and identify engineering strategies to maximize alkalinity addition without triggering precipitation.
Building precise, scalable measurement tools for open systems: Early deployments in EW and OAE are reliant on costly, manual sampling and complex simulations. To scale, we must move away from bespoke, fragile hardware toward mass-producible, low-cost sensors and efficient models that reduce computational overhead. We are looking for innovations—from soil pore-water sensors to marine mixing models—that offer immediate improvements while accelerating the transition to automated, low-cost monitoring for open systems.
Continuing to support novel carbon removal approaches with breakthrough potential: We seek projects that meaningfully beat the key performance metrics of Frontier's current portfolio companies. We are not looking for incremental improvements, but for step-change innovations that fundamentally outcompete existing technologies and offer a clear "unfair advantage" to highly scalable and low-cost carbon removal.
If you are working on any of the areas above, we want to hear from you. Apply here.