Google-backed Frontier Climate doubles down on German carbon capture startup with €29m agreement

Frontier Climate, the €900m initiative backed by Alphabet, Meta and many other major companies, is doubling down on German carbon capture startup Phlair.

Frontier, which is aiming to support carbon removal initiatives around the world, was Phlair’s first customer in September 2023 and is now also by far its biggest.

Frontier on Thursday announced an agreement with Phlair that will see its customers pay $30.6m (€29.4m) to remove 47,000 tons of CO2 between 2027 and 2030.

On-site solar panels drive down costs

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies make up one of the hottest climate tech sectors as scientists believe removing CO2 from the atmosphere is the only way of meeting global climate targets.

Phlair’s solution uses on-site solar panels to power a hydrogen-looping electrolyzer that uses electrochemistry to capture and release CO2, driving the cost compared to many other direct air capture (DAC) methods. The company raised €14.5m in a seed round as recently as September last year.

Now the agreement with Frontier will help support the company’s first commercial-scale DAC facility that is set to open later this year in Alberta, Canada.

“This offtake unlocks and drives down the cost of our supply chain, accelerating Phlair's scale-up by several years,” Phlair co-founder and CEO Malte Feucht.

Shopify and H&M among customers

Some of the companies who have agreed to buy carbon removal through Frontier include Google, Shopify, H&M Group and Salesforce.

“Direct air capture’s energy intensity doesn’t have to be a deal-breaker for DAC to scale to gigaton-level,” says Hannah Bebbington, head of deployment at Frontier. “Phlair’s combination of swapping heat for electrochemistry as well as its flexible energy management process shows one path to building energy-efficient DAC systems.”