Dive Brief:
- Frontier — the decarbonization initiative backed by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, McKinsey and others — announced on Thursday it had facilitated a $44.2 million carbon offtake agreement for its buyers with Canadian company Nulife GreenTech.
- Nulife’s carbon removal process uses biowaste as a feedstock to produce a concentrated bio-oil and biochar that can then be stored underground in salt caverns. Under the agreement, the company will remove 122,000 tons of carbon dioxide for Frontier’s buyers between 2026-2030, Frontier said in a blog post.
- The offtake purchases were facilitated for Stripe, Google, Shopify, H&M and other Frontier members, according to the post. Frontier also has a partnership with sustainability platform Watershed, which allowed additional companies, including Canva and Skims, to participate in the offtake, the post said.
Dive Insight:
Frontier said its buyers were Nulife’s first customers in 2024 in a prepurchase agreement, according to Thursday’s announcement. Nulife has so far delivered 407 tons of removals as part of that prepurchase, according to Frontier’s portfolio page. Frontier and its buyers have also previously invested in other bio-waste removal companies, including a $58.3 million deal with startup Vaulted Deep in 2024.
Nulife’s carbon removal process utilizes hydrothermal liquefaction, converting biomass waste from facilities like food processors, municipal waste facilities and paper mills into a carbon-rich oil. Nulife touts a patented hydrothermal liquefaction process, but the conversion process typically involves turning a feedstock into an oil through chemical reactions that take place in hot, compressed water, according to the American Chemical Society.
In a Thursday press release, Nulife called the deal a “significant vote of confidence” in the company’s platform and “real-world waste management value.” Nulife Co-founder Jerry Kristian said the deal gives the company “the long-term demand signal” needed to scale its biomass removal and storage platform.
The deal will allow Nulife “to deliver permanent carbon removal while helping communities and commercial operators — including agricultural processors, industrial facilities, and municipal operators — manage organic waste more sustainably and cost-effectively,” Kristian said in the press release.
Frontier estimated in its blog post that the volume of carbon removal through the hydrothermal liquefaction process “could reach 1.5 gigatons of CO2 removal per year by 2040.”
Other Frontier members involved in the offtakes include McKinsey Sustainability — a founding partner of the initiative — engineering design firm Autodesk and enterprise HR software platform Workday. Online dating service company Match Group, independent primary care network Aledade, vehicle fleet management platform Samsara, flight comparison company Skyscanner, fintech Wise and software-as-a-service firm Zendesk also participated through Frontier and Watershed’s partnership, according to the blog.
Frontier reports a decarbonization portfolio that includes over $713 million in offtake agreements and 1,886,898 tons of contracted CO2 removals, including $261 million and 688,300 tons of contracted removals since December 2024. Frontier has backed 52 total carbon removal projects, and Nulife and Vaulted Deep are among 13 biomass carbon removal and storage projects that the initiative has backed, according to its portfolio.
