Big Tech is Putting Big Money Behind Marine Carbon Removal
Anthropic, Google, Stripe, Salesforce and other tech firms have announced a new $915 million investment in a large-scale carbon-capture venture, which includes multiple projects linked to marine carbon removal. The idea of altering the ocean's chemistry to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has historically attracted controversy, and is legally restricted by the London Convention and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, but it is an area of active R&D.
The venture, Frontier Climate, operates as a joint investment fund for tech-sector giants who have an interest in offsetting their emissions at scale. It provides up-front funding for carbon-capture startups to develop their technology, which will eventually result in carbon credits, which will then be allocated to the investors. ALong the way, it hopes to scale up and demonstrate a model for joint public-private development of carbon capture capacity. It's on track for about 50,000 tonnes of CO2 removal this year across its portfolio, and says that it is creating a demand signal for new startups, having evaluated more than 500 of them so far.
Anthropic is its first pure AI-company investor, and its interest in offsetting emissions reflects the energy-intensive nature of the new industry.
Frontier lists about 50 climate engineering projects in its portfolio, and says that it is high-grading its project list going forward in order to select for scalability. The list is split into five main methods: biomass carbon removal and storage, direct air capture, marine carbon removal, field weathering and mineralization. In marine carbon removal, its investments include multiple alkalinity enhancement startups, including Pronoe, Planetary, Phathom, Crew, Planeteers and CarbonRun - all working on various strategies to add alkaline minerals to water in order to turn dissolved CO2 into stable bicarbonate. Some are in trial-scale operations and generating credits.
Ocean alkalinity enhancement is an accelerated version of an existing process - rock weathering, which naturally absorbs CO2. It is efficient and ranks near the top of the list for carbon removal potential, says Frontier. As a side benefit, it counteracts ocean acidification, which is harmful to many marine species.
Frontier believes that in time, OAE technology could be scaled up to remove as much as 10 gigatons of carbon per year, about twice the annual carbon emissions of the United States. But getting there would require investment, and lots of it. Scaling to one gigaton per year would require thousands of coastal outfall treatment sites, plus a fleet of hundreds of cargo ships to put calcined limestone into the ocean, along with a vast expansion of the industrial base for limestone calcination.
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"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," says Frontier.
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