Watershed customers Aledade, Canva, Match Group, Samsara, SKIMS, Skyscanner, Wise, and Zendesk are participating in a $40M offtake agreement with direct air capture (DAC) supplier 280 Earth, facilitated through Watershed’s partnership with Frontier. Frontier is an advance market commitment to buy an initial $1B+ of permanent carbon removal between 2022 and 2030. On behalf of their members, Frontier negotiates offtake agreements to purchase a predetermined amount of carbon removal from a supplier.
This latest purchase will permanently remove 61,571 tons of CO₂ by 2030 at 280 Earth’s pilot facility in The Dalles, Oregon. The offtake agreements will help 280 Earth build and operate additional modules at the facility.
280 Earth uses a ‘continuous capture’ DAC process built largely with commercially available components. The flexible process can be powered by waste heat from data centers, or clean electricity. This approach drives down the cost curve for DAC, minimizing both capital and operating costs. Their system works continuously by pulling air into contact with a proprietary sorbent developed by the 280 Earth team that captures the CO₂. The CO₂-rich sorbent is 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.
When integrated with data centers, which generate significant amounts of heat and require substantial cooling, 280 Earth’s 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 60 megawatt data center co-located with a 50 kiloton per year DAC system could save the center at least 200,000 tons of water annually. As the growth of artificial intelligence increases the demand for data processing, the need for data cooling is forecasted to grow exponentially, further expanding the scenarios where DAC systems could be integrated into data centers.
Frontier facilitated these purchases on behalf of Watershed's customers; Frontier Founding Members Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability; and Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, and Workday.
Read more about 280 Earth here.
