Startup 280 Earth, a product of Alphabet’s moonshot factory, has signed agreements worth US$40 million ($53.72 million) to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a newly completed facility in Oregon.
The agreements, facilitated by the Frontier coalition, will fund removal of 61,600 tons of the greenhouse gas from 2024 to 2030.
Founded by Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Shopify and Stripe, Frontier is an effort to fund carbon removal techniques, including using machines that pull carbon dioxide directly from the air — a field known as direct air capture. While there are several types of technology to do so, some require large amounts of energy.
The system designed by 280 Earth can use waste heat from a data centre to improve its efficiency, while cutting the centre’s cooling costs. Carbon dioxide is continuously pulled from the air with a sorbent, unlike competing technologies that remove CO2 in batches.
The company started in 2018 as a project of Google parent Alphabet’s X lab and become a separate business in 2022. Its new facility in The Dalles, Oregon, is located adjacent to a Google data centre.
