Carbon Removal

When Nan Ransohoff set up Frontier in early 2022, she had to answer a question every CDR buyer has to answer and most get wrong. She had close to a billion dollars in advance market commitments from Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, McKinsey, and a handful of others. She had a published cost table. The table told her, in clean rows and columns, what each method of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere cost per ton today. Cheapest at the top. Most expensive at the bottom.

She allocated almost none of the money to the cheap methods.

The analyst-conventional response to that decision would have weighted the buy toward the methods with the best current economics: afforestation, biochar, soil carbon. Frontier went the other direction. The dollars landed on enhanced rock weathering, mineralization, ocean alkalinity, and direct air capture. The $/ton numbers ranged from uncomfortably expensive to openly absurd. When Frontier signed Lithos Carbon in December 2023 for $57.1 million across 154,240 tons of weathered basalt, the implied price was $370 a ton, roughly thirty times the going rate for verified nature-based credits. Earlier purchases from Climeworks had run $775 a ton.