Carbon removal buyer coalition Frontier announced a new $41 million offtake agreement with bioenergy carbon capture & storage (BECCS) company storage Arbor, to remove 116,000 tons of CO2 between 2028 and 2030, on behalf of companies including Google, Shopify, and H&M Group.
The new offtake agreements will enable Arbor to proceed with its first commercial-scale plant near Lake Charles, Louisiana, which is targeting fully operational status by 2028, and to test the viability of its new, highly efficient BECCS approach for generating clean electricity and removing CO2.
Arbor was founded in 2022 by veterans of SpaceX, who have been leveraging recent advancements in oxy-combustion and supercritical turbomachinery – many of which they pioneered while developing rocket engines over the last decade – and applying them to electricity generation.
The company’s approach converts waste biomass into syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, using a new gasifier design, with the gas then sent to an oxycombustor, a specialized furnace that burns the gas with pure oxygen instead of air, producing supercritical CO2 and water. The supercritical CO2 then drives a turbine to generate clean electricity,
According to Arbor, its approach generates 1,000 kWh of clean electricity for every ton of CO2 removed, increasing the efficiency of converting biomass to electricity by more than 30%, and enables a carbon capture rate greater than 99%, enabling it to reduce costs while meeting demand demand for clean electricity for users including data centers.
Hannah Bebbington, Head of Deployment at Frontier, said:
“We need to remove gigatones of CO2 from the atmosphere and we need a lot more clean electricity to meet the pace of AI’s development. Though they are two separate challenges, Arbot tackles both with a single solution.”
Arbor’s system also produces excess water as a byproduct. In future projects, the company hopes to sell this excess water for uses such as data center cooling and irrigation.
Launched in April 2022, the Frontier coalition is an advance market commitment to buy permanent carbon removal, aimed at accelerating the development of carbon removal technologies with guarantees of future demand. Frontier vets suppliers, aiming to identity those focused on solutions with the potential to achieve high volume carbon removals at low cost.
Companies participating in the $41 million offtake agreement include Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability, as well as Autodesk, H&M Group, and Workday. Additionally, through Frontier’s partnership with Watershed, companies including Aledade, Canva, Match Group, Samsara, SKIMS, Skyscanner, Wise, and Zendesk will also participate.
For Frontier, the transaction marks the latest in a series of carbon removal agreements, which have included power and heat provider Hafslund Celsio, enhanced rock weather startup Eion, biomass carbon removal and storage project developer CO280, and wastewater treatment process CO2 project CREW Carbon.
Brad Hartwig, Arbor’s CEO, said:
“Carbon removal approaches that deliver both net removal and decarbonization benefits will scale quickly. This offtake agreement with Frontier buyers accelerates a model that removes carbon while generating the reliable, zero-emission energy our power grid needs.”
