Watershed customers Aledade, Canva, SKIMS, Wise, and Zendesk are contributing to offtake agreements with CarbonCapture and Heirloom as part of Watershed's partnership with Frontier. The purchase will remove 70,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2030.
Watershed customers and Frontier buyers will pay CarbonCapture $20M to permanently remove 45,500 tons of CO₂ by 2028 and Heirloom $26.6M to remove 26,900 tons of CO₂ by 2030. The purchases account for the removal itself as well as measuring, reporting, and verifying (MRV) that each ton is safely stored and accounted for according to rigorous protocol.
Founding Frontier Members Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability, along with Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase and Workday, also participated in the offtake agreements.
“Watershed is democratizing decarbonization,” said Claire Kiely, Head of Watershed Marketplace Supply. “By aggregating demand from our customers, the Watershed Marketplace enables more companies—at a wider range of budget options—to fund innovative carbon removal projects that will play a pivotal role in combating climate change.”
Both CarbonCapture and Heirloom use a technology called direct air capture (DAC) to remove carbon from the atmosphere. DAC pulls CO₂ out of ambient air via a recurring cycle of CO₂ capture and release that’s facilitated by a sorbent or solvent. The resulting CO₂ stream can then be coupled with geologic sequestration or mineralization for permanent carbon removal.
DAC is one of several promising technologies accelerating the removal of carbon from the Earth's atmosphere. It is highly durable, easy to measure and verify, and takes up a small physical footprint relative to other kinds of carbon removal. DAC’s main challenge is the high cost per ton, which is driven by both operational costs as well as the energy required to power the process. Frontier sources DAC technologies that are likely to have particularly steep cost curves and fast iteration speeds. CarbonCapture and Heirloom meet those standards.
Read more about CarbonCapture and Heirloom’s technologies here.
