Latitude Media: Frontier bets $41 million on CDR-plus-energy for data centers
Arbor, a California-based carbon removal startup, has landed a $41 million offtake agreement from the Frontier coalition, in one of the advanced market commitment’s largest such deals to date. The contract will help fund Arbor’s first commercial-scale facility in Louisiana, which is expected to come online in 2028 and to remove 116,000 tons of carbon dioxide in two years.
The deal comes at a moment when the wider carbon removal industry remains in its infancy, but is gaining momentum. Most major deliveries remain years away, and despite an acceleration in promises to purchase from key buyers, only about 2.5% of tons sold have actually been delivered.
In the U.S., the landscape for CDR startups has been complicated by policy uncertainty since the start of the second Trump administration. For buyers and investors, that means that carbon removal approaches that can generate additional economic value beyond credits alone have an additional appeal.
“Carbon removal technologies that have co-benefits broadly, and certainly co-products [that can be sold] are really poised for scale and are pretty resilient to political shifts,” said Hannah Bebbington, head of deployment at advanced market commitment Frontier. “If you have diversified revenue opportunities, you are more insulated from market risk.”
That dynamic is present in the agreement Frontier signed with Arbor, Bebbington said.
Arbor’s system is a next-generation approach to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. The company converts waste biomass from timber plantation thinnings into synthetic gas: a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That gas is then burned in a furnace with pure oxygen, producing water and a high-pressure form of carbon dioxide. That CO2 spins a turbine to generate electricity, before being captured and stored underground. For every ton of carbon dioxide Arbor’s system removes, the company states that it also creates up to 1,000 kilowatt-hours of clean electricity.
And that dual use means that the startup is well-positioned to target the booming data center market, Bebbington explained.
“We need to remove gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere and we need a lot more clean electricity to meet the pace of AI’s development,” she said. “As we are thinking about carbon removal demand and where our electricity generation is going to come from, and how we are going to ensure that we are powering this [AI] boom as cleanly and efficiently as possible, Arbor really fits the bill.”