Energy startup Arbor notches $41M deals amid Trump reversals
Why it matters: The contracts for 116,000 tons of CO2 removal between 2028 and 2030, for buyers working through the Frontier consortium, comprise Arbor's biggest deal yet.
It's one of the "anchor agreements" that will help the 3-year-old startup finance and build its first commercial-scale plant near Lake Charles, Louisiana, CEO Brad Hartwig tells me.
Driving the news: Buyers include Stripe, Google, Shopify, McKinsey, Autodesk, H&M and various others.
The new deal follows a much smaller agreement with Microsoft last year.
How it works: Arbor is a bioenergy with carbon capture (BECCS) startup, using waste biomass that will initially come from forest management.
But it's an evolution of BECCS, with 99% capture and high efficiency, a blog post states.
Its process first gasifies biomass, then burns that gas in a special furnace with pure oxygen ("oxy-combustion"), producing water but also "supercritical" CO2 that drives a turbine.
This simplifies and reduces CO2 capture costs, and the water can be used for irrigation or data center cooling, Arbor and Frontier said.
Reality check: First-of-a-kind hardware systems often don't survive the journey to commercial deployment or scale.
But Hartwig sees Arbor's system among the energy sources that stand to benefit from the AI boom.
"Demand for carbon-free energy is just accelerating at rates that are completely unprecedented, and we have a pretty unique technology stack that can deliver 24/7, carbon-free energy that is cheap and firm," he tells Axios.
What we're watching:"We've gotten a lot of interest from a whole host of folks, from hyperscalers to regulated utilities looking to develop projects for matching supply with load for data centers," Hartwig said.
The intrigue: Asked whether Trump 2.0's reversal of climate policies creates headwinds, he argued the opposite, citing "real interest in baseload power that can add to grid resilience."
He also said behind-the-meter deployments are possible, avoiding the need for transmission or waiting in interconnection queues.
State of play:"Its compact design features an 18 MW turbine about the size of a car engine, allowing for efficient scaling and cost reductions," the announcement states.
Its modular system and oxy-combustion tech don't produce exhaust or pollution, avoiding the cost of adding separate CO2 capture units.
Scaling the technology provides an eventual pathway toward getting under $100/ton of removal, the post states.
The tech also works using natural gas, which would provide power with CO2 capture, but it's not removal without the biomass.
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