Stripe picks $1m in carbon-removal projects to spur industry

The billionaire Co Limerick brothers, who control San Francisco-based online payments company Stripe, are spending a quarter of a million dollars to import special sand to a remote Caribbean beach.

But founders Patrick and John Collison are not creating a waterfront hideaway. Instead, Stripe is supporting an approach to fighting climate change. The beach project – taking coarse-milled olivine to the water's edge so the waves can grind it up, allowing the ocean to absorb more carbon – is one of four investments in carbon removal Stripe will announce today.

Another technology deal will fund putting carbon into concrete to strengthen it, while a third takes biomass that would decompose and spew carbon – such as almond shells –- and produces bio-oil for burial far underground.

Stripe is spending $1 million (€921,000) all told, following chief executive Patrick Collison’s August pledge that instead of buying cheap carbon offsets, such as those from landowners who agree not to cut trees, the company would pay much more for innovative methods to get carbon dioxide out of the air.

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Some studies have found that a majority of offsets used for regulatory compliance or tax breaks do not measurably and effectively improve the air, even if they let companies claim to be carbon neutral.

Instead of looking for the cheapest offsets for carbon emissions, which can cost as little as $10, Stripe will pay as much as $800 per tonne for promising new approaches.

Project co-leaders Ryan Orbuch and Nan Ransohoff approached the task like venture capitalists.

"We're looking for underfunded and underinvested-in areas, relative to their importance in fighting climate change," said Ms Ransohoff. "That's pushed us toward more early-stage stuff."

But the projects had to have a plausible path to neutralizing large amounts of carbon at low cost, Mr Orbuch said.

Stripe is far from the first to sponsor carbon removal, which can take a multitude of forms, from tree-planting to fans sucking carbon dioxide from smokestacks or the open air.

But the collective scale of existing projects is orders of magnitude from where the experts say it needs be in 2050. They say there is no way to limit temperature increases to those in the global Paris agreement without massive carbon removal on top of emission reduction.

Forestry projects

Though forestry projects are popular, their success is hard to measure, Stripe’s advisors warned. Someone promising not to cut trees might drive up the price for that kind of tree, prompting others to sell.

So Stripe moved toward four projects outside of forestry.

One of them, Switzerland-based ClimeWorks, is one of the three best-known startups that take carbon straight out the air.

ClimeWorks’ biggest plant is in Iceland, where it takes advantage of geothermal heart for energy to bury carbon 900 meters underground.

Stripe is one of a handful of corporate customers for negative emissions and will help fund a new plant about five times as big, said founder Jan Wurzbacher.

The second is eight-year-old CarbonCure Technologies, which puts carbon into concrete. CarbonCure’s method is used in 285 concrete plants.

The venture-backed Canadian company excited Stripe’s advisors because the concrete industry is one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gases, and because the technology makes financial sense even before government subsidies for emission reductions.

The third recipient is a San Francisco-based vendor called Charm Industrial which will produce bio-oil from biomass that would otherwise decompose, then sequester it underground. – Reuters