Alphabet, Meta among 5 companies that pledge close to $1 billion for carbon capture

Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, Mckinsey and Stripe have committed $925 million to purchase captured carbon till 2030, according to a new initiative they collectively call as the Frontier, a statement said.

The money will be invested into carbon removal technologies. It will help scale up deployment of environmentally friendly technologies and make it easier for enterprises that are trying to purchase captured carbon. 

Carbon Capture and Storage or CCS, is a method of reducing carbon emissions which usually involves three steps. Firstly capturing C02 produced by industries, second is transporting this carbon and thirdly storing it in a safe place, mostly underground bunkers. 

According to the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in order to achieve the goals setup at the Paris Agreement and limit global warming there is a need to deploy technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere.   

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Facilities are already present in countries such as Iceland to capture carbon dioxide from the air but the technology is still considered expensive.

This is what Frontier seems to want to tackle, to bring the cost of carbon capture down by raking up more demand. Frontier, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of financial services company Stripe, will provide carbon capture solutions through its Stripe Climate Program.   

The frontier is just one of the many initiatives that are investing heavily on carbon capture. In terms of governments, US had a bipartisan Infrastructure Bill which included $3.5 billion investment into carbon-capture technologies. On the other hand, the UK and the European Union have committed to capture five million tons of CO2 per year.  

In March, Apple invested $4.7 billion to develop low carbon manufacturing, carbon-free aluminium parts in its devices.