“There’s broad recognition that net zero by 2050 requires not just carbon abatement,but carbon removal at the gigaton scale,” said AspiraDAC executive director Julian Turecek. “What Frontier is doing is helping to facilitate new technologies into that market.”
Stripe’s Frontier project brought together Meta,Alphabet (Google),Shopify and McKinsey&Company to create a US$925 million ($1.36 billion) fund for backing carbon removal technology.
To fulfil the deal,AspiraDAC plans to build about 180 carbon capture modules on an acre of arid land. A bank of DAC devices of that size would,at a cost of at least $1000,remove a tonne of carbon from the atmosphere each day.
That’s less carbon produced by one passenger’s return flight from Sydney to Singapore.
But Frontier only invests in projects it believes could eventually remove carbon at the gigatonne scale for less than U$100 ($148) per tonne.
“Twenty years ago,solar[energy] was very expensive,” said Turecek. “But over the last two decades,it’s come down to become the cheapest form of energy. We believe that direct air capture can follow the same path of technology cost reduction.”