Opinion
Ransohoff: Carbon removal sector remains far off track to dent climate crisis
“I would say generally this field is not currently on track for carbon removal to make a material dense in the climate crisis. Like, even with the recent progress, even with all these companies that we're finding and funding and all the press and, you know, Str…”
Disclosure
Ransohoff: Stripe requires 1,000-year permanence and a sub-$100 price trajectory
“And what we're looking for is solutions that have more than a thousand years of permanence that have a pathway to sub a hundred dollar a ton removal, even if they're expensive Today, and we've paid more than 2000 dollars per ton from heirloom this last cycle. …”
Disclosure
Ransohoff: Stripe ignores current carbon prices to focus on sub-$100 glide paths
“So we Stripe don't care what the price is today. We are very focused on trying to understand what the glide path for each of these technologies looks like on the way to sub a hundred dollars and more than half a gigaton.”
Opinion
Ransohoff: Forcing early carbon removal to compete with $10 offsets undermines industry
“And I worry that there's a lot of pull to treat it like that right now. And there's a lot of pull to sort of to, you know, list everything on a carbon market and have it compete with 10 dollar per ton offsets. And that's, I don't think that's going to set it u…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ransohoff: A $1 Trillion Voluntary Carbon Removal Market Is Highly Unlikely
“A voluntary market of a trillion dollars a year is Is highly unlikely to happen.”
Disclosure
Ransohoff: Stripe Climate buys expensive frontier carbon removal to accelerate cost curves
“We then, Stripe, aggregate those funds and use it to buy carbon removal from really promising solutions that are expensive today, but that have the potential to be really low cost and high volume in the future. So essentially we're trying to help we're like bu…”
Disclosure
Ransohoff: Stripe prioritizes permanent carbon removal as the biggest climate solution gap
“Our approach is let's look across
The climate sort of ecosystem.
Find what we think the biggest gap is and where we think we are in a somewhat good position to move the needle on it.
And carbon removal where we're pulling CO two out of ambient air or out of…”
Disclosure
Ransohoff: Stripe awards fixed-dollar contracts, back-solving volume for early startups
“For most companies, we are giving them the same dollar value or just buying different number of tons from them. We sort of back solve the number of tons based on the total contract value.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ransohoff: Carbon removal prices will take decades to converge
“I just think that, you know, for them to be even in the realm of similar prices is going to take, you know, we are basically putting the first dot on the cost curves right now, and those cost curves look different for every single company, and it's going to ta…”
Assertion Supported
Ransohoff: Under 10,000 tons permanently removed globally across $30M historical spend
“For context, to date, probably about thirty million total has been spent on frontier carbon removal, and less than 10,000 tons that have actually been permanently removed”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ransohoff: US lacks dedicated permanent CO2 storage infrastructure like Iceland's Carbfix
“Transportation and storage of CO₂ streams is something that we are seeing a lot of the companies that apply to Stripe Climate struggle with. You know, they will have a really compelling capture technology and can essentially use lots of different storage They …”
Assertion Supported
Ransohoff: Stripe Climate faces severe carbon removal shortage, buying into 2026
“One of our big observations over these past two rounds of purchases has been, you know, we have a massive supply shortage. Currently Stripe Climate is buying carbon removal years into the future. For some of these companies, 20, 20, 26.”
Disclosure
Ransohoff: Stripe offers $500k first-customer contracts to qualifying carbon removal startups
“And our partnership with Activate and with Deep Science Ventures is essentially saying, you know, we will, for any company that meets our Target criteria. We will give you a 500,000 dollar procurement contract to be your first buyer and help bridge that commer…”
Insight
Ransohoff: Carbon removal startups need customer offtakes to secure bank financing
“This field is going to benefit from a very similar construct of offtakes right? So these companies need, need to de-risk, especially in carbon removal when there, you know, isn't an intrinsic use like there is with energy. Banks want to understand that there r…”
Disclosure
Ransohoff: Stripe was the first customer for seven of ten removal applicants
“So far, the companies that have applied to our RFP are all startups, and we were the first customer for seven of 10. We're not opposed to buying from later stage companies, but we haven't seen them.”
Disclosure
Stripe Climate is splitting carbon procurement into capture and storage tracks
“We are actually evolving our Stripe climate purchase process this year to think about capture and storage separately so that there's going to be a storage track and a capture track, and we can help sort of mix and match those.”
