Frontier portfolio

Direct air capture

Pulling carbon directly out of the air, then storing it safely and permanently

A direct air capture facility with rotating fans pulling in air to remove carbon dioxide.

Permanent carbon removal

23% of fund spend

Direct air capture (DAC) involves pulling CO₂ directly out of the air, then storing it safely and permanently. Think about it this way: wastewater plants clean and recycle our water, and it’s considered an essential service. We need a solution like that for cleaning our air. That’s where DAC comes in.

Right now, it’s really tricky to pull carbon from the air. Our atmosphere contains over 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon right now. That’s enough to drastically impact our climate, but it’s still only 0.04% of the air. Capturing it is like spilling a single drop of ink into a swimming pool and pulling it back out again.

Thankfully, technology that can do this exists. And that’s great news, because it takes some of the pressure off: if we can scale this technology and make it more affordable, we can keep emitting some greenhouse gases, knowing we can pull them back out. We still need to reduce our emissions everywhere we can, but DAC is one of the essential tools we need to help us capture more carbon than we emit.

Shopify has purchased a combined total of 15,000 tonnes of DAC carbon removal from Carbon Engineering and Climeworks. This is the largest amount of DAC carbon removal purchased by any company.

Captured carbon can be:

Carbon Engineering, British Columbia Facility

Company spotlight

Carbon Engineering

Harvard professor David Keith founded Carbon Engineering to investigate direct air capture, because it was becoming increasingly clear that even bringing global emissions to zero would not be enough. We also need to remove carbon from the atmosphere to halt climate change.

Carbon Engineering now has proven technology that can suck CO₂ right out of the air. They are working with partners to build industrial facilities that capture one million tons of CO₂ per year—the equivalent of annual emissions from 250,000 cars or the work of 40 million trees.

Currently, Carbon Engineering is building an Innovation Centre in Squamish, BC to refine their CO₂ capture process. Additionally, their development partner 1PointFive is engineering their first large-scale DAC plant in the Permian Basin.

Their technology can be located almost anywhere. That means they can build facilities in ideal locations that have low-cost, clean energy to power the system, or in spots where it’s easy to permanently store CO₂ underground. Even if natural gas is used to power the plant, all CO₂ emissions from the combustion process are captured and stored underground along with the atmospheric CO₂.

Essentially, their technology pulls in air, uses chemical reactions to extract CO₂, then puts the rest of the air back into the atmosphere. It’s like a human-made tree but faster, taking up less land and delivering pure, compressed CO₂ that can be stored underground or reused.

Shopify has agreed to purchase permanent carbon removal from Carbon Engineering’s Innovation Centre as a demonstration of our belief in this method, and to provide them with a new revenue stream so they can keep scaling their technology. We have also agreed to purchase 10,000 tonnes of permanent carbon removal from Carbon Engineering’s large-scale DAC facility.

This 10,000 tonne purchase sends a clear message that buyers are looking for permanent carbon removal and that large-scale DAC technology is a key solution to solve climate change. Additionally, our purchase from Carbon Engineering will support the development of projects that combine DAC with standalone sequestration of atmospheric CO2, rather than enhanced oil recovery.

“The fundamental value of our technology is that it can eliminate any carbon dioxide emission from any place and any moment in time.”

—Steve Oldham, Carbon Engineering CEO

Company spotlight


Climeworks cofounders Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald met on their first day of university in Zurich. They discovered a mutual passion for alpine sports and were both horrified by the visible retreat of the Swiss Alps’ glaciers. So they used their engineering skills to address this problem.

Climeworks removes CO₂ from the air with direct air capture machines. An Icelandic company called Carbfix mixes the captured CO₂ with water and pumps it deep underground. Through natural mineralization, the CO₂ reacts with basalt rock (formed from cooled lava) and turns into stone within a few years, removing it from the air permanently. This is a gold standard carbon dioxide removal solution.

Early customers like Shopify demonstrate market demand, which will allow Climeworks to scale their technology, achieve massive cost reductions, and drive down price to make their solution more accessible. The more early customers Climeworks gets, the faster this can happen.

Construction is well underway for Climeworks’ new direct air capture and storage plant in Iceland called Orca. Climeworks has impressively scaled its carbon dioxide removal capacity 80x in 3-4 years. Once operational later in 2021, the facility will capture 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year.

Shopify has made a multi-year commitment to purchase 5,000 tonnes of carbon removal from Climeworks. By purposefully supporting carbon removal over the long-term, our goal is to help Climeworks continue to scale their gold-standard solution.