Key Impact Points:
- Arbor secures one of Frontier’s largest offtake deals to date with a $41M commitment to support a commercial carbon removal and energy facility in Louisiana
- Arbor’s tech removes CO₂ while generating clean electricity and water, making it uniquely attractive to the fast-growing data center market
- The deal highlights a shift toward CDR approaches with co-benefits, offering resilience amid policy uncertainty and increased demand from AI-powered infrastructure
Frontier Backs Arbor’s $41M CDR-Energy Deal
California-based startup Arbor has landed a $41 million carbon removal offtake agreement from Frontier, one of the coalition’s biggest such deals to date. The funding will support Arbor’s first commercial-scale facility in Louisiana, expected to launch in 2028 and remove 116,000 tons of CO₂ over two years.
“This is the decade where we are investing in the category to make sure that we know what works and what doesn’t work,” said Hannah Bebbington, Head of Deployment at Frontier. “We’re going to see some real success stories, and some real failure stories, and that’s absolutely to be expected.”
How Arbor’s Tech Works
Arbor’s approach is a next-gen take on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). The system turns timber waste into synthetic gas, then burns it with pure oxygen to generate electricity. This process creates water and pressurized CO₂ — the latter is captured and stored underground.
For every ton of carbon removed, Arbor’s process can generate up to 1,000 kilowatt-hours of clean electricity, while also producing water, which the company plans to sell for uses like data center cooling.
Carbon Removal Meets AI Demand
Bebbington emphasized Arbor’s fit with surging demand from data centers and AI infrastructure.
“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. “Arbor really fits the bill.”
The electricity and water outputs give Arbor diversified revenue streams, making it more appealing to investors and more resilient to political shifts in U.S. carbon policy.
Frontier’s Strategy: Co-Benefits and Caution
This investment reflects Frontier’s broader strategy: backing carbon removal projects with marketable byproducts.
“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,” Bebbington said.
Other startups in Frontier’s portfolio, like 280 Earth, also target data centers by offering direct air capture plus waste heat reuse and cooling services.
Reality Check Ahead of 2028 Launch
While promising, Arbor’s solution won’t be commercially deployed until at least 2028. Frontier’s funding is contingent on Arbor meeting key milestones in technical performance, carbon removal, power generation, and system uptime.
“We knew 2025 was going to be a year of bumpy deliveries,” Bebbington said. “We are seeing the delays and bumpiness that we expected from being in a new market…we knew forecasts were going to be wrong, that’s why Frontier exists.”
Despite hurdles, Frontier sees this as part of the experimentation phase needed to identify scalable technologies by the 2030s and beyond.
Related Article: Frontier Commits $33 Million to Carbon Removal Through Enhanced Rock Weathering by Eion
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