Big brands are paying startup Vaulted Deep $58.3 million to shoot feces and other organic waste products into underground wells to combat climate change.
The deal was brokered by a group called Frontier Climate, which Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey Sustainability founded in 2022 to support emerging climate technologies. Specifically, Frontier is interested in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They connect buyers with startups like Vaulted Deep that are developing ways to capture CO2 and sequester it underground so it doesn’t heat up the planet.
Vaulted Deep’s strategy is to collect wastewater, manure, and waste from agriculture and paper mills and inject it deep underground to prevent the carbon in the waste from escaping into the atmosphere as it decomposes. In addition to Frontier’s founding companies, Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, Workday and other brands are also part of Frontier’s agreement announced today. As part of the agreement, Vaulted Deep agreed to sequester 152,480 tons of carbon dioxide by 2027. This is equivalent to shutting down around 36,000 gas-guzzling cars for a year.
It is Frontier’s largest agreement to date and a major endorsement of Vaulted Deep’s technology
It’s Frontier’s largest deal to date and a big endorsement of Vaulted Deep’s technology, which the startup says will allow it to grow much faster than its competitors in the growing carbon removal industry.
According to Vaulted Deep, the advantage is that it builds on technology that has been used for decades to clean up sludge from oil and gas fracking production. Hydraulic fracturing – also known as fracking – is a particularly complex method of extracting fossil fuels. Companies had to find a way to dispose of all the rock and fluids left over from drilling, which could contain heavy metals like arsenic and radioactive materials like uranium.
Omar Abou-Sayed, CEO of Vaulted Deep, says his father and his colleagues developed the technology to inject the nasty stuff deep underground while working for Arco. His father later became a consultant for other companies that had to comply with rules set by the Clean Water Act of 1972.
The trick is finding a way to inject solid waste underground without clogging the well (Abou-Sayed likens the problem to soil building up on a coffee filter). He adopted his father’s technology to do the same with carbon-rich organic waste by injecting it with enough pressure to open cracks and pores in the rock.
“No technology magic has to happen. It’s not a scientifically fair experiment. So our sinking cost curve is not the case [like other companies] where they have to invent the science to make what they do more efficient,” says Abou-Sayed. “Our problem is more like the McDonald’s problem: which intersection is best for McDonald’s to have the most car traffic.”
A slew of other companies have set up shop to suck carbon dioxide out of the air or water, but it’s still an exorbitantly expensive endeavor. According to a recent report, the U.S. may need to spend about $100 billion a year on these types of technologies to reach a level that would help the country meet its climate goals.
The company, which now operates the largest facility for filtering CO2 from the air, charges its customers (including Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify) about $600 per ton of CO2 captured. Frontier’s deal with Vaulted Deep works out to around $382 per ton, although the industry goal is still to get below $100 per ton to make it a viable tool to combat climate change. Vaulted Deep says it will achieve this goal in large part by placing its wells closer to where it extracts the waste it pumps underground. The deal with Frontier is expected to allow the company to bring three new wells into production in the US (assuming permits are granted, of course).
Vaulted Deep, for example, already absorbs about 20 percent of Los Angeles’ sewage sludge. This could be a better raw material for this technology than manure or agricultural waste, which could be reused as fertilizer in regenerative agriculture. “There just seems to be a lot of good things and a few bad things that are going to disappear forever,” says Brian Roe, a farm management professor at Ohio State University. “It’s nice to have more tools in your toolbox. I’m just kind of fascinated to figure out how this is going to work.”
In order to have a positive impact on the environment, Vaulted Deep must demonstrate in its carbon footprint that it is actually avoiding CO2 emissions. For example, if a farm avoids using manure that it would otherwise have used to add nutrients to the soil, what are the environmental costs if that farm potentially switches to synthetic fertilizers instead? Vaulted Deep says it considers these types of questions and is working with a carbon removal registry called Ismetric to verify its process.
Vaulted Deep only emerged in September from the waste management company Advantek, where Abou-Sayed is also chairman of the board. But its mature technology means “we were born as teenagers, so to speak,” says Julia Reichelstein, CEO of Vaulted Deep, who was an investor at climate VC fund Piva Capital before joining. “When I met Omar … there was a lightbulb moment,” she says, and Frontier’s support is now “really huge.”