Milkywire Backs 3,661 Tonnes of Carbon Removal for Salesforce

Milkywire has completed Salesforce-backed pre-purchases covering 3,661 tonnes of durable carbon removal across eight suppliers, spanning direct air capture, ocean alkalinity enhancement and underground biomass storage. The purchases fall under Salesforce's pledge to contract 100 million dollars in durable carbon removal by 2030, and follow an earlier round covering 19 suppliers that Milkywire announced in January. Rather than distributing capital toward the cheapest available tonnes, Milkywire selected these eight suppliers specifically to fund first-of-a-kind deployments, novel geographies and technical milestones intended to generate learnings the rest of the carbon removal field can draw on.

 

Buying Technical Firsts Rather Than the Lowest-Cost Tonnes

 

The portfolio's defining feature is what each contract is designed to prove, not how much carbon it removes. The two largest allocations by tonnage, 816 tonnes to Carba for biocarbon burial and 667 tonnes to Alkamy Carbon for wastewater-based alkalinity enhancement in Mumbai, both went to relatively mature, low-tech storage methods being extended into new settings rather than novel science. That distribution suggests the largest tonnage commitments in this round were reserved for approaches Milkywire already has some confidence in, rather than the newest or riskiest pathways in the portfolio.

The smaller contracts carry outsized technical ambition instead. Sirona Technologies' 390-tonne deal funds the world's first heat pump integration on a commercial DAC project, aimed at cutting the energy cost that has historically made direct air capture expensive, while PRONOE's 131-tonne contract, the smallest in the portfolio, funds the EU's first land-based ocean alkalinity system built onto an existing industrial desalination plant. Milkywire is effectively pricing technical risk and precedent-setting value above raw tonnage in these smaller deals, a deliberate inversion of how a conventional offset buyer would allocate capital.

 

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Geography Is Doing as Much Work as Technology in This Round

 

Three of the eight contracts are targeted at extending proven or emerging methods into locations where they have not yet been tested. Alkamy Carbon's Mumbai project is expected to generate the first wastewater alkalinity dataset collected under tropical conditions, filling a gap in a technology pathway tested mostly in temperate climates so far. Yama's 263-tonne contract builds on France's first operating DAC pilot to construct a 365-tonne-per-year demonstration facility, extending direct air capture's commercial footprint into a country without an established DAC industry.

Cowboy Clean Fuels' 500-tonne contract applies a biomass-to-coalbed storage method specific to Wyoming's Powder River Basin geology, a pathway that depends on regional subsurface infrastructure rather than being replicable anywhere else. Read together, these three contracts suggest Milkywire is treating geographic diversification as being as important to market development as technical diversification, since a removal pathway proven in one country or geology does not automatically transfer to another with different climate conditions, regulations or subsurface characteristics.

 

The Remaining Contracts Target Byproduct Economics and Storage Permanence

 

The two contracts not yet discussed, Brineworks' Netherlands project and Deep Sky's Quebec project, both address a different problem: how to make capture economically viable or storage more permanent rather than proving a first or filling a geographic gap. Brineworks pairs electrochemical DAC with green hydrogen co-production, using a saleable byproduct to offset some of direct air capture's substantial energy cost, an economic strategy distinct from Sirona's efficiency-focused heat pump approach to that same underlying cost problem.

Deep Sky's 394-tonne Thetford Mines project binds captured carbon to mineral rock rather than injecting it as gas, trading a more complex process for storage that is arguably more permanent and easier to verify than geologic injection. Between these two contracts and the geographic and technical-first purchases already discussed, the portfolio ends up testing four distinct constraints on carbon removal's path to scale simultaneously: cost, energy demand, storage permanence and geographic transferability.

 

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A Portfolio Betting on Learning Transfer Rather Than Volume

 

Aidan Preston, senior impact manager at Milkywire, said buying tomorrow's carbon removal solutions today is how the market brings down costs and builds a sector capable of scaling, and argued more buyers need to take a long-term view supporting a broad range of removal approaches at different maturity levels. Jamila Yamani, director of climate and energy at Salesforce, said the company backed these eight suppliers because each contract helps get a pilot or demonstration unit built and generates learnings expected to inform future deployments industry-wide.

Whether that expected learning transfer actually happens, whether Sirona's efficiency gains inform other DAC operators, or Alkamy's tropical dataset changes how alkalinity enhancement is deployed elsewhere, will only be visible once these projects report results, and will shape whether Milkywire's next round with Salesforce continues prioritizing technical firsts or shifts toward funding proven methods at greater volume.

 

Source: Milkywire