Why Geochemistry Will Be the Key to Scaling Industrial Waste Carbonation

Frontier has just sent a strong signal to the carbon removal sector.

By announcing a new $915 million commitment and identifying surficial mineralization as one of the most promising carbon removal pathways, the coalition backed by Stripe, Google, Shopify, Anthropic, and others has done much more than announce new funding.

For a long time, accelerated carbonation of alkaline industrial residues was considered a niche research topic. Today, it is emerging as a technology capable of simultaneously

addressing climate, industrial and environmental challenges.

Why?

Because it combines several advantages that are rarely found in a single technology:

✅ permanent CO₂ storage through mineral carbonation;

✅ robust MRV (Measurement, Reporting & Verification) enabled by controlled industrial processes;

✅ feedstocks already available at large scale (steel slags, incineration bottom ash, alkaline dusts...);

✅ existing industrial infrastructure;

✅ value creation extending far beyond carbon removal alone.

The technologies that truly scale will probably not be those that capture the most CO₂.

They will be those that also solve industrial challenges: waste stabilization, pollutant control, critical metal recovery, and the production of lower-carbon construction materials.

We founded Alkaline Technologies with one conviction: the real challenge is not only to capture CO₂, but to master the geochemical complexity of alkaline industrial residues.

That is why a significant part of our work focuses on two key areas:

🔬 Understanding the mechanisms governing pollutant mobility (Sb, Cr, As, Pb, Cd, chlorides, sulfates...) so that carbonation-based processes can simultaneously improve the environmental performance of treated materials.

📊 Understanding and anticipating feedstock variability through advanced sampling, characterization, classification and data analysis approaches, in order to develop robust processes that can be transferred to industrial scale.

In this field, the next decade will not simply be about carbon removal.

It will be about technologies capable of addressing real industrial needs by transforming complex residues into valuable resources while permanently removing CO₂.