Frontier, the corporate-backed carbon removal buyers' coalition, has signed an $11.7 million offtake agreement with 44.01 covering 20,932 tonnes of CO2 removed through underground mineralisation in the United Arab Emirates. Deliveries are scheduled between 2028 and 2031. It is Frontier's first purchase of this technology, according to its official announcement.

The price works out to roughly $559 per tonne — a figure that will either fall or become the reason this pathway stays niche. The deal's purpose is not volume. It is to find out whether in-situ mineralisation can run continuously for years rather than months.

What does the process actually involve?

The project will use biogenic CO2 captured during biogas upgrading at a wastewater treatment plant in the UAE. The gas will be dissolved in water and injected into peridotite, a rock formation whose minerals react with CO2 to form stable solid carbonates. The carbon stays underground, in mineral form, permanently.

That permanence is the selling point. The engineering question is durability of operations.

Why years of continuous operation matter

The agreement is designed to establish whether the technique can operate continuously over multiple years, generating data on injection rates, water requirements and operating costs. Previous field trials have demonstrated the process over shorter periods only. Sustained operation is the step between demonstration and commercial deployment.

The UAE offers a precedent, at pilot scale. In November 2024, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and its partners reported that a 44.01 pilot had mineralised 10 tonnes of CO2 in Fujairah over 100 days. The new contract is larger by three orders of magnitude in tonnage and, more importantly, stretches the operating window from 100 days to years.

10 tonnes over 100 days is a chemistry experiment. Nearly 21,000 tonnes over a multi-year delivery schedule is a facility.

What did the two sides say?

Hannah Bebbington Valori, head of Frontier, framed the technology as a way to widen the map of permanent storage.

"Where we can store CO2 shouldn't limit where we can remove it," she said.

Talal Hasan, founder and CEO of 44.01, positioned the contract as the bridge out of the demonstration tier.

"This first-of-a-kind agreement with Frontier marks an important step in taking in-situ mineralization from demonstration into commercialization," Hasan said in the company announcement published by Frontier.

The approach could reduce reliance on long-distance pipelines and shipping where reactive rock formations sit near emissions sources — a logistics argument, not merely a geological one.

How large is the prize?

Frontier estimates that suitable peridotite formations worldwide could potentially store more than five billion tonnes of CO2 annually. The coalition itself flags the caveat: that figure is estimated geological potential, not proven operating capacity.

Potential applications cited include emissions captured from cement and steel production, alongside dedicated carbon removal projects — hard-to-abate streams where storage proximity matters most.

What decides what happens next

The contracted volume is small against global emissions. The deal functions instead as a commercial-scale test with two pass-fail criteria: whether the process sustains higher operating durations, and whether costs fall far enough below roughly $559 per tonne to attract wider demand.

The first delivery deadline, in 2028, is the milestone to track. Before then, watch for injection-rate and water-use data from the Fujairah-adjacent trials — the numbers that will show whether mineralisation competes with conventional storage or remains a well-funded curiosity. Between now and 2028, the evidence arrives one operating quarter at a time.