An initiative called Frontier, created to spend $1 billion on unproven carbon-removal technologies, raised an additional $915 million this week from backers including Stripe, Google, Shopify and Anthropic, as the industry’s deliveries have more than doubled each year for the past three years, according to Nan Ransohoff, who handed over leadership of Frontier this week.
Ransohoff, who founded the initiative and now holds a broader climate role at Stripe, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the field has transformed since she began working on it in 2020. “In 2020, you could talk to everybody in the field in a couple of weeks, and I did. It did not take me long to network my way through the major players,” she said. “Today, there are hundreds of companies across five major pathways. I don’t know nearly everyone in the field, and I think that is a really marked shift. There are thousands of people working on this.”
The Frontier model — guaranteeing future demand to spur innovation, borrowed from vaccine development — was launched in 2022. It aimed to signal to entrepreneurs that customers would pay high prices for carbon removal, incentivizing methods ranging from spreading carbon-absorbing rock on fields to burying waste underground. The initiative now wants to concentrate its bets on the most promising approaches, Ransohoff said.
Ransohoff described carbon removal as a long-term infrastructure challenge akin to building sewers. “Nobody got famous building sewers, but cities don’t work without them. Carbon removal is like that for the climate — it’s essential, it’s invisible, it’s not especially glamorous, but these infrastructure projects are what make society tick over the long haul,” she said. She called it a “150-year infrastructure challenge” and said progress requires steady effort sustained over decades, through administration changes and shifting public attention.
Demand remains uneven. Microsoft, the largest corporate spender on carbon removal, recently told some suppliers that purchases were on hold, though the company later unveiled another deal and said the program had not ended. Governments in Europe, California and elsewhere plan to fund carbon removal, but their efforts are still in early stages.
“At the scale we need, demand for carbon removal is going to have to be policy-motivated,” Ransohoff said. She noted that about a dozen countries are working on carbon-removal demand policies that could total about $10 billion per year by 2035. “In the meantime, voluntary buyers have to keep playing a role to bridge the gap.”
Ransohoff added that Frontier’s deliveries have more than doubled every year for three years. “This is a 150-year infrastructure challenge. We are six years in, and the key to winning is going to be steady progress that’s sustained over decades through administration changes, through being in and out of vogue in different parts of the world,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect anything to stay in vogue for a century, climate included. Our grandchildren will still be working on this.”