Stripe and other tech companies commit USD 925 mln toward carbon capture

Payment service provider Stripe has teamed up with several tech companies to commit nearly USD 1 billion in spurring the carbon-capture market.

The companies announced the creation of Frontier, which plans to purchase USD 925 million worth of permanent carbon removal from companies that are developing the technology over the next nine years. Frontier will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Stripe. Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey are chipping in and committing to purchase some of the carbon-capture solutions.

Frontier’s job will be to collect financial commitments from companies and governments that want to purchase carbon-capture solutions to make good on their net-zero pledges, vet the suppliers of those solutions and then pay the suppliers once the solutions are delivered.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that to limit global warning to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, an average of 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide will have to be removed each year from the atmosphere by 2050. Fewer than 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide have been captured to date.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report, released on 4 April 2022, specifically mentioned the importance of carbon capture, saying it is ‘necessary to achieve net zero CO2 and GHG emissions both globally and nationally, counterbalancing residual emissions.’ 

The Frontier development is among other company and government initiatives that are sinking billions into the technology. Stripe will also provide customers to Frontier through its Stripe Climate programme, which allows online sellers using the company’s platform to devote a portion of sales to carbon removal.