Frontier has officially facilitated offtake agreement worth $58.3 million with Vaulted Deep, a carbon removal company that injects carbon-rich organic waste deep underground for permanent storage. Under the agreed terms, Frontier buyers will pay the stated amount to permanently remove 152,480 tons of COâ‚‚ between 2024 and 2027, while simultaneously retaining the option to purchase more tons from future projects at lower prices. For Vaulted Deep, the given agreement enables it to commission three new wells that are to optimize feedstock availability, transportation, and well capacity. Now, to understand what makes Vaulted an ideal partner for such an effort, we must start by taking into account those plants that naturally draw down COâ‚‚ from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, with much of the extracted COâ‚‚ ending up as carbon-rich waste in the form of biosolids, manure, food or agricultural waste. Eventually, this waste is incinerated, landfilled, or spread on land. Markedly enough, the whole thing turns into a problem when the waste in question burns or decomposes, considering it sends all the captured CO2 back into the atmosphere. This is what Vaulted Deep prevents from happening, and it does that by turning waste into carbon-rich slurry before injecting it deep into disposal wells for permanent geologic storage. Once the injecting part is duly completed, the volume of carbon removed is measured by weighing it in the biomass and subtracting emissions generated at every stage during the process, including transportation and energy usage.
“Vaulted’s technology, developed by Advantek, has been primed to address carbon removal for decades, even before there was a market. Technologies like ours that can scale quickly without compromising durability or quality will lead the way. Our proven CDR is what makes possible Frontier’s largest offtake to date,” said Julia Reichelstein, CEO at Vaulted Deep.
Talk about the benefits of Vaulted’s approach on a slightly deeper level, we begin from the potential for scale being much larger due to the abundance of waste and flexible storage options. You see, waste biomass has the potential to deliver upto 300Mt of carbon removal annually in the US alone. It can be injected underground using Class V injection wells or their equivalents, widely used to dispose byproducts generated by industrial and agricultural activities. These walls, on their part, can be built in a large variety of locations, making storage capacity virtually unlimited. Next up, we must get into the approach’s low cost opportunity, which is largely generated by three key reasons. The first is naturally the fact that COâ‚‚ capture process happens naturally via photosynthesis at no cost whatsoever. The second reason would be how slurry injection technology can be done with minimal feedstock processing, thus eliminating processing costs. The third and final reason is rooted in facility capex being inexpensive, as well as in the flexibility to use easily available commercial equipment and construction services. Taking all these factors into consideration, there is an aim to bring down costs well under $100 per ton.
Moving on, another upside of Vaulted’s ideology is concerned with its Advantek-themed origins. This translates to how, as a spinoff from an established waste disposal company, Vaulted is able to access an existing permitted well infrastructure, along with a team which has longstanding operational experience and expertise in deep well waste injection technology. On a practical note, such a detail involves having the means to deliver something like CDR quickly, and that too, without a lengthy research and development period. Lastly, we have in play several health and environmental co-benefits due to Vaulted approach’s safer way of disposing the waste. The disposal process includes diverting organic biomass waste to permanent sequestration, therefore eliminating the harmful effects of incinerating or spreading the waste feedstock on land.
