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Today we’re diving in to JP Morgan’s latest move in their climate strategy and digging deeper in to some of the technologies that corporates are spending big bucks on. Let’s get in to it.

Carbon removal for days

This week, JPMorgan Chase (JPM), the biggest bank in America, announced one of the largest Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) Plans from a corporate to date.

JPM announced a number of deals with a total target of removing or storing 800,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and they’re backing it up with the big bucks - at least $200m worth.

These agreements are expected to enable JPM to match their entire unabated direct operational footprint by 2030 - in other words, their scope 1 and 2 emissions. Not too shabby for a bank that is a literal manifestation of capitalism. Let’s dig deeper into some of the deals

Green Energy Three Ways

If we’ve learnt one thing, the headlines don’t really matter. It’s not enough to throw carbon in the name of your new initiative, It’s the details that make a difference. When we dig deeper, there’s a lot to learn from how JPM is approaching their climate transition strategy.

There are three parts of their strategy in particular that are worth looking further into:

• Direct Air Capture (DAC) purchases

• Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage (BiCRS)

• Advance Market Commitment Coalition (no fancy acronym for this one!)

Let’s break these down.

DACs refer to technology where CO2 is extracted directly from the atmosphere and then stored or used as a raw material. For this specific initiative, JPM is working with climate tech Climeworks to pull this off. It’s like a massive vacuum cleaner that sucks out the CO2 from the air and puts it under your mattress.

BiCRS refers to a process in which biomass (think leftovers from farming) are converted into heat or electricity and the carbon emissions are captured and stored. For this approach, JPM is working with CO280, another climate tech startup focused on scaling this solution up through B2B partnerships

Thirdly, JPM has committed some of this capital to Frontier. Frontier was setup by Shopify, Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey in 2022 as an advanced market commitment coalition. In other words, Frontier collects capital from large institutions who want to improve their carbon footprint and then provides large committed contracts to support new technologies looking to scale.

More about all of these technologies in future newsletters. Probably…

JPM’s overall strategy is incredibly interesting. They’ve diversified across projects, covered their full scope 1 and 2 emissions, supported a number of new technologies today and in the future. In doing so, they’ve also protected themselves from the criticism that a number of other corporates have recently faced. Let’s see how this all pans out.

Until next time,

The Strawman