“Looking out across a dairy farm in Germany, you might see cows, verdant pastures and a grazing shed or two for the herd.
But for Google, McKinsey and other companies that are part of the Frontier coalition focused on carbon removal, they see such cattle farms as a way to green the planet -- with the help of shipping-container-size power plants.
The Frontier coalition of carbon removal buyers is backing German startup Reverion, paying it $41 million to remove 96,000 tons of carbon dioxide between 2027 and 2030.
The startup uses biogas to produce green electricity and CO2, which eventually will be captured and then permanently stored. It is being seen as a way to help lower the emissions from cattle farming and make the electricity grid greener at the same time.
"We think this approach could remove hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 by 2040," said Hannah Bebbington Valori, head of deployment at Frontier. "If you look at [International Energy Agency] projections for biogas, the theoretical carbon removal potential is in the gigatons. So, there are many carbon removal approaches that are looking at using biogas or biomass from farms."
Companies like Alphabet's Google, payments processor Stripe and apparel maker Skims, are part of the Frontier coalition, which is aiming to back solutions to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and that can be done fairly cheaply. It is aiming to invest $1 billion in solutions by 2030.
It bases its purchasing decisions on solutions it thinks eventually can be sold at $100 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, with the potential to remove gigaton amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that between 5 gigatons and 10 gigatons will likely need to be removed yearly to keep temperatures aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming.
In many cattle farms and even sewage plants today, waste from plants or animals is placed in anaerobic digesters to break it down and produce manure and biogas -- a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane.
Both of those gases are toxic for the environment when released, in particular methane, which has a very high global warming impact.
But biogas is also a very useful fuel source. Reverion uses the biogas to produce clean electricity. It pumps the biogas through a solid oxide fuel cell, which on the other side produces electricity and carbon dioxide.
Frontier's investment will mean Reverion will capture and liquefy the CO2 so it can be permanently stored, earning carbon removal credits.
"The issue with biogas is it's about half methane and half carbon dioxide," said Roger Aines, energy program chief scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who specializes in clean technology research.
"They're easy to separate but there's nothing you can do with the CO2 and so it gets dumped in the air and the methane gets put in the pipeline," he said. "The advantage of this new technology is that instead it turns [biogas] into electricity and so you avoid the criticism that the methane is going to leak from pipelines and that leak is going to overwhelm the climate benefits of using methane to begin with."
Reverion's fuel cell power plants are roughly the size of a 20-foot shipping container, like those found on the back of a truck. A single power plant can power about 100 homes, but because the technology is modular, it can be scaled quickly, co-founder and Chief Executive Stephan Herrmann said. Its largest site currently can power 500 homes.
Herrmann said that one of the reasons why he was attracted to this solution was because "biogas plants are essentially an existing technology that [has] been around for many years." As a result, across hundreds of sites in Germany already, and potentially thousands globally, the technology can be dropped in and added to existing farms.
"Up to now, CO2 has been emitted into the atmosphere -- this is what we are looking to change," said Herrmann. "Because the CO2 coming out of our unit is of high purity, we can essentially use that CO2 straight away, liquefy it and transport it so it can then be stored. That essentially, then removes the CO2 from the atmosphere permanently."
One of the other benefits of Reverion's solid oxide fuel cells is that they can also be run in reverse to produce hydrogen.
This means that when energy prices are low, or even negative, as is often the case in the middle of the day in places like Germany, farmers can produce green hydrogen. "That's interesting because it gives the farmer two ways to use their own equipment," said Aines. "When you have two different ways to operate equipment like that, it gives you two different ways to make money."
Around the world there are roughly 140,000 biogas sites, which Frontier says could mean the carbon removal potential could reach more than 2 gigatons annually by 2040.
"We think a lot about the flywheel that comes with real delivery starting to materialize," Bebbington Valori said. "Real facilities are starting to get built, and it's not just in building confidence on the buyer's side, but more broadly making it clear to the world that carbon removal is real, it's possible, it's here."” [1]
The company highlights that operators can achieve a return on investment in under 40% of the plant's lifetime.
1. Business News: Carbon-Capture Plan Turns Farms Into Power Plants --- Group backs new technology that produces green electricity. Khan, Yusuf. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 Nov 2025: B5.
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