Silicon Valley is in love with a company that pumps poop underground

Big brands are paying startup Vaulted Deep $58.3 million to dump poop and other organic waste into underground wells as a way to combat climate change.

The deal was brokered by a group called Frontier Climate, which Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey Sustainability launched in 2022 to support emerging climate technology. Specifically, Frontier is interested in trying to remove 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 warm the planet.

Vaulted Deep’s strategy is to collect sewage, manure, and agricultural and paper mill waste and inject it underground to prevent carbon from the waste rising 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 the agreement that Frontier announced today. Vaulted Deep agreed to sequester 152,480 tons of carbon dioxide by 2027 as part of the deal. That’s it equivalent taking about 36,000 gas-guzzling cars off the road for a year.

It’s Frontier’s biggest deal to date and a major endorsement of Vaulted Deep’s technology that the startup says will allow it to grow much faster than its competitors in the growing carbon removal industry.

Vaulted Deep says its advantage is that it is built on technology that has already been used for decades to get rid of sludge from oil and gas fracking. Hydraulic fracturing – also known as hydraulic fracturing – is a particularly complicated way to extract fossil fuels. Companies needed a way to dispose of all the rocks and fluids left over from drilling that could carry heavy metals, such as arsenic, and radioactive materials, such as uranium.

Omar Abou-Sayed, executive chairman of Vaulted Deep, says his father and his colleagues developed the technology to inject the nasty material underground while working for Arco. His father became a consultant for other companies that needed to comply with the rules established in the Clean Water Act of 1972.

The trick is to find a way to inject solid waste underground without clogging the well (Abou-Sayed compares the problem to the build-up of grounds in a coffee filter). He adopted his father’s technology to do the same with carbon-rich organic waste, injecting enough pressure to open fissures and pores in the rocks.

“There is no technological magic that needs to happen. It’s not a science fair experiment. Therefore, our move down the cost curve is not [like other companies] where they have to invent the science to do what they are doing more efficiently,” says Abou-Sayed. “Our problem is more like McDonald’s problem of what is the best intersection to put McDonald’s in to get the most car traffic.”

A flurry of other companies have opened doors to sucking carbon dioxide from the air or water, but it’s still an exorbitantly expensive endeavor. The US may have to spend around $100 billion a year on these types of technologies in order to reach a level that helps the country meet its climate goals, according to a recent study. report.

The company that operates the largest CO2 air filtration facility today charges customers (including Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify) about $600 per ton of CO2 captured. Frontier’s deal with Vaulted Deep comes to about $382 per ton, although the industry’s goal is still to get to less than $100 per ton to make it a viable tool to combat climate change. Vaulted Deep says it will achieve this goal largely by locating its wells closer to where it is getting the waste it pumps underground. The deal with Frontier should allow the company to commission three new wells in the US (if it can get the permits for them, of course).

Vaulted Deep already absorbs about 20% of Los Angeles’ sewage sludge, for example. This could be a better raw material for this technology than manure or agricultural waste that could be reused as fertilizer in regenerative agriculture. “It seems like there’s a lot of good stuff along with some bad stuff that’s going to fall through the cracks forever,” says Brian Roe, professor of agricultural management at Ohio State University. “It’s good to have more tools in the toolbox. I’m kind of fascinated with figuring out where this is going to work.”

To have a positive environmental impact, Vaulted Deep will need to prove in its carbon accounting that it is actually avoiding CO2 emissions. If a farm abandons the manure it would otherwise have used to add nutrients back into the soil, for example – what are the environmental costs of that farm potentially turning to synthetic fertilizers? Vaulted Deep says it is taking these types of issues into consideration and is working with a carbon removal log called Isometric to examine your process.

Vaulted Deep just spun off from waste management company Advantek, of which Abou-Sayed is also executive chairman, in September. But its mature technology means “we are born teenagers,” says Julia Reichelstein, CEO of Vaulted Deep, who was an investor in climate venture capital fund Piva Capital before coming on board. “When I met Omar… there was an aha moment,” she says, and Frontier’s support now is “really huge.”