280 Earth, a carbon capture startup spun out from Google parent Alphabet, has secured a $40 million deal.

Frontier, a carbon capture buying consortium, has facilitated a set of direct air capture (DAC) offtake agreements with 280 Earth, a company employing a DAC system that permanently removes carbon dioxide from the air.

Frontier has facilitated purchases on behalf of founding members Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability, as well as Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, and Workday. Also, Aledade, Canva, Samsara, SKIMS, Skyscanner, Wise, and Zendesk have purchased via Watershed’s partnership with Frontier.

DAC systems literally suck carbon out of the atmosphere with fans and permanently sequester it, often underground.

The Frontier buyers will pay 280 Earth $40m to permanently remove 61,571 tons of CO₂ between 2024 and 2030 at their pilot facility in The Dalles, Oregon.

The pilot module at The Dalles facility was completed in May 2024, and the Frontier buyers are the first to purchase from that unit. The offtake agreements will help 280 Earth build and operate additional modules at the facility.

John Pimentel, 280 Earth CEO, said: “Frontier’s forward-thinking members are providing critical leadership to attract private sector investment to decarbonize our atmosphere. This contract provides revenues that help 280 Earth drive down costs for our highly efficient direct air capture system."

Hannah Bebbington, head of strategy at Frontier, added: "DAC’s benefits make it an important potential part of the global carbon removal portfolio, but we need smart ways to lower costs and scale the pathway. 280 Earth’s unique process design offers them a pathway to overcome the challenging cost barrier for DAC."

280 Earth was originally launched in 2018 at X, the moonshot factory founded by Google, and spun out in 2022. The company raised $50 million in May.

The first phase of The Dalles development was built to capture 500 tons a year of CO2; the site is sized to capture more than 20,000 tons a year at full build-out, and the company is planning other DAC facilities throughout the US.

The system works continuously by pulling air into contact with a proprietary sorbent team that captures the CO₂, which is then conveyed to a vacuum chamber that is kept at a constant temperature and pressure, where it releases the CO₂. The pure stream of CO₂ can then be permanently stored underground or mineralized in concrete. The company is building a carbon capture plant with commercially available components and can draw power from several sources, including electricity or industrial waste heat.

When integrated with data centers, 280 Earth said its approach can use water vapor captured during the removal process to provide the additional benefit of reliable cooling capacity, reducing water usage. 280 Earth estimates that a 60MW data center colocated with a 50 kiloton per year DAC system could save the facility at least 200,000 tons of water annually. Google operates a campus in the Dalles close to 280 Earth’s DAC plant.

Frontier Climate makes aggregated purchases of carbon capture credits from a number of companies, projects, and technologies. Frontier has invested in projects from the likes of Vaulted Deep, Lithos, CarbonCapture Inc., Heirloom, Airhive, Inplanet, and Living Carbon. Frontier has contracted for more than $228 million of carbon credits to date; Google has previously said it has made purchases through Frontier, without providing details.

Microsoft, Shopify, and Amazon have also separately invested in DAC projects. As well as investing in third parties’ projects, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are all also working on their own DAC technologies using waste heat from data centers.

Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce have also partnered on the Symbiosis Coalition, an advanced market commitment for nature-based removal credits in the voluntary carbon market.