As the world’s largest companies scramble to tackle the impacts of climate change, Big Tech is betting on a surprisingly low-tech solution to reach their net-zero goal. Enhanced rock weathering already happens naturally over thousands of years, but startup Lithos Carbon is accelerating the process, spreading leftover rock dust across farm fields.
The company is scaling its operation with financial backing from Frontier, a consortium of investors that include Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), and JPMorgan (JPM). The climate fund, led by payments processing company Stripe, committed $57.1 million to Lithos Carbon last year to remove over 154,000 tons of carbon.
Lithos Carbon is one of hundreds of startups globally that are competing in a carbon removal industry expected to reach $135 billion by 2040, according to consulting firm BCG.
Once considered a workaround for critical emission-cutting work, carbon removal technologies, which extract and sequester carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere, are increasingly seen as a necessary step to capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050, as laid out in the Paris Agreement.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said the world needs to remove up to 10 billion tons of carbon per year by the middle of the century to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Roughly 2,400 companies have disclosed having net-zero targets in place, according to nonprofit group CDP. Many of those firms are turning to carbon removal technologies to offset emissions, as they realize that emissions reductions alone won’t get them within their net-zero goals. Demand for carbon credits is projected to quadruple from 2030 to 2040, according to BCG.
Big Tech firms are among the biggest buyers of carbon removal credits. Microsoft (MSFT), the leading buyer globally, has purchased more than 7.6 million carbon credits, since 2020 according to online tracker CDR.fyi.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Akiko Fujita and Luke Brooks.