Google, Facebook, Stripe Reveal $925M Plan to Capture Carbon Pollution

Climeworks Orca carbon capture system

Climeworks’ Orca captures carbon dioxide from the air.

Climeworks This story is part of The Cost of Climate Change, CNET’s coverage of how the changing climate impacts a range of financial issues.

The parent companies of Facebook and Google have joined a nearly £1 billion program designed to fight climate by committing to purchase carbon capture technology when it’s developed.

Meta and Alphabet said on Tuesday they had joined Frontier, a subsidiary of payment processor Stripe that pledges spending will eventually flow to approved carbon capture projects. E-commerce company Shopify and consulting firm McKinsey have also joined the Frontier program. Frontier is an example of an advance market commitment, a guarantee that developers of a technology will be able to sell it once it’s been developed.

The arrangement is used when the cost of developing a new product, such as a vaccine or drug, is so high that companies worry that doing so won’t be profitable. Frontier’s members have pledged to spend a combined £925 million through 2030 on technologies that remove carbon dioxide, the primary gas causing global warming, from the atmosphere. Most efforts to combat climate change focus on reducing emissions in the first place, for example, by shifting to renewable energy and reducing meat consumption, but carbon capture could be important to compensate for carbon emissions from operations like steel and concrete production.

Carbon capture will only help if it works economically at an enormous scale of gigatons per year. Climate change is causing an increase in storms, droughts and wildfires, as well as plunging biodiversity, according to a February Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. So far, carbon capture technology has permanently removed less than 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, far short of the billions of tons per year the IPCC says is needed.

Frontier hopes that by pledging to buy carbon capture technology, its members can encourage entrepreneurs to develop the systems needed. “With Frontier, we want to send a loud demand signal to entrepreneurs, researchers and investors that there is a market for permanent carbon removal: build and we will buy,” Nan Ransohoff, head of Stripe’s climate work, said in a statement. Tech giants already have sought to reduce their carbon footprint by purchasing renewable energy and other efforts.

In March, Microsoft called for more businesses to enter the carbon capture market.