Rethinking the carbon removal blueprint
While many carbon removal companies are racing to commercialize breakthrough technologies, CO280 has taken a different route. Founded in Vancouver, the company’s business plan from day one was not to invent a new capture method – but to deploy what’s already proven at meaningful scale.
“We saw a gap in the engineered carbon removal space,” explains Natalie Khtikian, co-founder and chief commercial officer. “Most players were technology companies.” No one else was focused on building and financing full-scale projects using technology that was already bankable.
CO280’s business model is simple in principle but bold in execution: identify existing industrial CO₂ sources – specifically, pulp and paper mills – retrofit them with capture infrastructure and deliver certified carbon removal credits to large corporate buyers. “We are the only tech agnostic and pathway agnostic player in the space,” Khtikian says. “That means we can give our customers exactly what they want: permanent, verifiable, affordable CDR credits.”
At first glance, pulp and paper may seem like an unlikely starting point for a climate tech company. But Jon Rhone, CO280’s co-founder and CEO, says the logic is compelling.
“About 80 to 90 percent of the CO₂ emitted from pulp and paper mills is biogenic, which is carbon neutral” he explains. “So, capturing and storing it results in actual negative emissions.”
With more than 130 mills in North America alone, the sector also offers scale. And many of these mills are conveniently located within 50 to 75 miles of deep saline aquifers – ideal for permanent storage. Rhone points out that CO280 benefits from plugging into an established industry rather than building one from scratch: “We’re able to retrofit the mills and leverage all that existing infrastructure and supply chain. It makes us efficient and keeps our costs low.”
“We are the only tech agnostic and pathway agnostic player in the carbon removal space.”
Natalie Khtikian, Co-Founder & Chief Commercial Officer, CO280
Joint ventures, not transactions
To finance its projects, CO280 doesn’t sell capture tech or carbon credits to mill owners. Instead, it forms joint ventures with them – co-owning, co-developing, and operating the CDR infrastructure.
“Building one of these carbon capture plants can cost a billion dollars in capital,” says Rhone. “So, we needed a model that works off balance sheet, that attracts private capital, and that still gives our pulp and paper partners real skin in the game.”
In this structure, both CO280 and the mill operator contribute equity, while the remainder is financed through project debt. Revenue comes from a mix of U.S. 45Q tax credits and long-term offtake agreements.
The impact? “Some of our projects are doubling the EBITDA of the host mill,” Rhone says. “That’s transformative – not just for the project, but for revitalizing the industry by increasing revenue, increasing profitability and securing rural manufacturing jobs.”
The company has eight projects in development, with the first – on the U.S. Gulf Coast – on track to reach final investment decision (FID) in 2026.
As Khtikian puts it: “We need to activate private capital to really scale a new class of energy transition asset. That means projects have to be profitable and everybody must be properly incentivized.”
“Some of our projects are doubling the EBITDA of the host mill.”
Jon Rhone, Co-Founder & CEO, CO280
A maturing, but still narrow, CDR market
Despite high-profile offtakes, Khtikian is realistic about where the CDR market stands today. “Right now, it's dominated by a relatively small group of wealthy companies,” she says. “Microsoft has purchased about 70 to 80 percent of credits ever sold in the engineered CDR space.”
But she is confident the market will broaden as more companies complete the long journey from setting net-zero targets to actually purchasing removals. “It’s a multi-year journey that customers need to go through and we’re focused on accelerating that.”
Recent offtake agreements with JP Morgan and Frontier validates the model. The JP Morgan deal is the largest engineered CDR purchase to date from any buyer other than Microsoft.
CO280 is betting that their lower-cost, high-integrity credits – priced under $200 per ton – will unlock demand. “We are a fraction of the cost of other engineered solutions,” Khtikian says.
Engineering without the guesswork
Unlike early-stage carbon capture startups, CO280 uses only proven, de-risked technology. “The technologies we select have to be fully commercially proven and they need to have been successfully deployed at scale in other industries,” says Rhone.
That currently means commercial liquid amine capture systems, which have been validated at scale in other industries. The company is continuously benchmarking other options – from cryogenic capture to solid sorbents – it isn’t in a rush to adopt them. CO280 follows a dual mandate: prioritize technologies that are fully de-risked and bankable today, while supporting the broader ecosystem of earlier-stage innovations poised to scale. The focus is on commercial readiness now, with a long-term commitment to enabling what’s next.
“The capture technology is actually a fairly small percentage of the overall capital cost,” Rhone notes. “The lion’s share is in integration, infrastructure, and energy.”
That’s why energy efficiency is a top priority for CO280. “The Achilles heel of amines is their requirement for large amounts of steam,” he says. “Driving down the amount of energy required for capture is super-important.”
Tax credits like 45Q play an important role, but CO280’s business isn’t dependent on them. Khtikian sees government support as a catalyst that helps de-risk early projects, but points out that the company’s model works on its own fundamentals.
“The technologies we select have to be fully commercially proven and they need to have been successfully deployed at scale in other industries.”
Jon Rhone, Co-Founder & CEO, CO280
