The company paid $775 per ton for the removal of 322.5 tons of CO2, or roughly 10 percent of Orca’s first year of capacity. Orca is the 19th DAC facility in the world, according to the International Energy Agency the other 18 are small-scale plants operating in Europe, the United States and Canada.Ĭlimeworks was one of the four startups that sold carbon removal credits to Stripe back in May 2020. Located outside Reykjavik, the plant will capture roughly 4,000 metric tons of CO2 per year and permanently store it deep underground in basalt rock formations. Zurich-based Climeworks recently won the race to open the world’s first large-scale commercial DAC facility - its Orca plant went online in Iceland in September. Just a few years ago, many viewed DAC as a costly fantasy unlikely to scale to the point where it’d be worth the investment.Ī handful of first-generation carbon removal companies, notably Climeworks and Carbon Engineering, are reaching commercial scale with DAC technology, funded largely by private sector investment and, increasingly, carbon credit buyers such as Stripe, Microsoft and Shopify. These technologies differ from carbon capture and storage (CCS) - also known as "point source" carbon capture - which catches emissions from power plants and other industrial smokestacks before they are belched out into the atmosphere. The carbon is then sequestered underground or sold to end buyers that use it to make stuff, including building materials, jet fuel, plastic and carbonated drinks. "You have companies making these really big purchases of carbon removal and paying a lot for it."ĭAC is the most advanced among a slate of technologies that pull CO2 from the ambient air. "It feels just years ahead of where it was even a couple of months ago," Noah Deich, president of the nonprofit Carbon180, told GreenBiz. However, demand for carbon removal from a select but growing cadre of companies willing to pay big bucks to reach net zero or beyond - along with a promised influx of cash from the federal government - represents a potential driver for growth that seemed to come, well, out of thin air. Just a few years ago, many viewed DAC as a costly fantasy unlikely to scale to the point where it’d be worth the investment. This month, it agreed to fork over $6 million more to four more carbon removal startups, bringing the total to $15 million in purchases from 14 companies.įor the young businesses working on direct air capture (DAC) and other carbon removal technologies, the "any price" part of Stripe’s commitment is huge. As part of that pledge, the Irish-American company said it would pay "any price" for the removal and secure long-term storage of CO2. The move was Stripe’s first step toward making good on its negative emissions commitment, a pledge to eliminate more CO2 from the atmosphere than it contributes. In May 2020, online financial services company Stripe announced it would pay four startups using various technologies between $75 and $775 per ton to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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