Four gargantuan tech companies have put together a $1.2 billion fund to pull carbon out of the atmosphere with a unique model that could go a long way to preventing 1.5°C of warming.

The money will be fronted by companies looking to purchase a security which guarantees a certain amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere, but rather than bidding up prices for existing methods of carbon capture, Frontier will fund additional methods.

Set up by Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Shopify, and Stripe, their fund—called Frontier—has its own motto: Build and We Will Buy.

A wholly-owned subsidiary of Stripe, Frontier will also be funded by the tens of thousands of businesses who purchase carbon removal via Stripe Climate. This will make Frontier the world's largest coalition of carbon removal purchasers through funding and membership.

The fund will build an eight-year, $925 million commitment to accelerate the development of permanent carbon removal technologies, by aggregating demand from buyers looking to offset the carbon emissions from their supply chain, before distributing that demand among suppliers—in this case firms with proven technology to pull carbon from the air.

Frontier, managed by McKinsey Sustainability, will focus on solutions with permanence, or the ability to store carbon for more than a thousand years; solutions which will be affordable at less than $100 per ton of carbon; can be verifiable; don't rely on arable land, and remove carbon already in the atmosphere rather than relying on preventing carbon from entering it.

"Frontier aims to send a strong demand signal to researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors that there is a market for carbon removal," Alphabet said in their release.

Following the recent report by the IPCC regarding the lack of progress made on carbon-cutting goals, McKinsey Sustainability joined up with the Frontier effort in support of developing carbon removal technology by offering pro-bono advisory support to carbon removal startups and businesses taking part in the initiative.

Carbon can be pulled from the air in various ways, some more effective than others, and some are more scalable.

Among these are strategies as varied as giant fans which suck up CO2, separate it from oxygen, and then deposit it deep underground—and vodka made from ethanol created with CO2 from the air.

Other methods trap carbon in building materials like concrete made by this Richard Branson-backed startup, or into lifeforms like algae before being made into household products.

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