Did Microsoft Really Spend $1.7 Billion on Human Waste?
Short answer: Microsoft has signed a 12-year contract with startup Vaulted Deep to keep up to 4.9 million tonnes of CO₂ out of the air by injecting liquefied sewage and other organic scraps nearly a mile underground. The headline price tag of $1.7 billion is only an outside estimate—neither company will confirm the actual cost.
Read on to see what’s verified, what still smells fishy, and why the world’s second-most-valuable firm is suddenly obsessed with your poop.
1. The Number Nobody Will Put in Writing
The viral claim:
“Microsoft is paying $1.7 billion for the deal—about $350 per tonne.”
The reality:
- Verified: Microsoft disclosed the volume (up to 4.9 Mt) and the duration (12 years). Press release
- Unverified: The price. Reporters simply multiplied 4.9 Mt by an assumed $350/t. That math yields ≈ $1.7 billion, but no primary source confirms it.
So, Microsoft may be spending billions—or merely hundreds of millions—but no one outside the negotiation room knows for sure.
2. How Do You Bury Banana Peels—and Biosludge—5,000 Feet Down?
- Garbage in: Vaulted Deep gathers a thick “bioslurry” made from
- sewage-treatment sludge,
- farm manure,
- paper-mill waste.
- Grind & pump: The mixture is blended into a flowable soup.
- A mile-deep injection: Specialized pumps push the slurry into rock layers ≈ 5,000 ft underground—“nearly a mile,” according to the firm.
- Rock-solid lock-up: In those salty, oxygen-poor zones, decomposition slows to a crawl, trapping carbon for (they claim) thousands of years.
Vaulted says the method also stops methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from escaping on the surface and reduces water pollution from land-spread biosolids. (Vaulted Deep tech page)
3. Why Microsoft Suddenly Needs to Hide Carbon—Fast
Microsoft’s own sustainability report shows its total greenhouse-gas footprint rose about 30 % between 2020 and 2024, largely because of electricity-hungry AI data centers. (Datacenter Dynamics)
Yet the company still vows to be carbon-negative by 2030 and erase all its historical emissions by 2050. To square that circle, it is on a buying spree for “durable” carbon-removal credits:
- AtmosClear: 6.75 Mt of BECCS (bio-energy with carbon capture) over 15 years.
- Vaulted Deep: up to 4.9 Mt of buried bioslurry over 12 years.
By tonnage, only the AtmosClear contract is larger. By cost? Unknown—again, no figures published.
4. Sorting Facts From the Flush
| Claim in Original Article | Fact-check Verdict | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 4.9 Mt CO₂ over 12 years | True | Microsoft confirms |
| Injection depth ≈ 5,000 ft | True | Company materials & media |
| Deal costs $1.7 B | Unverified | Only media arithmetic |
| Methane is “4×” stronger than CO₂ | False | It’s 28–30 × over 100 yrs (EPA) |
| Microsoft bought 83 Mt of credits | Unverified | Company discloses ≈ 30 + Mt |
| Second-largest removal deal ever | Mostly True by tonnage | Cost ranking unknown |
5. The Open Questions
- Cost transparency: Will Microsoft ever reveal the real price per tonne?
- Permanence: Independent scientists still need long-term monitoring data to prove carbon stays locked away for centuries.
- Scale: The contract covers < 10 % of Microsoft’s projected emissions this decade. Will many more “poop wells” pop up?
- Side effects: Deep-well injections have triggered small earthquakes in some regions. Vaulted says its geology avoids this, but peer-reviewed studies are scarce.
6. Why This Matters Beyond Microsoft
Think of the climate problem as a bathtub filling too fast. Cutting the tap (emissions) is vital, but a second tool—pulling the drain—is now catching investor dollars. Whether we’re injecting waste, grinding up rocks, or building giant fans that vacuum the sky, durable carbon removal is racing from curiosity to commodity.
Yet the Vaulted Deep story shows a pattern:
- Eye-popping headlines about billions.
- Sparse contract details.
- Big climate promises racing ahead of peer-reviewed proof.
In other words, carbon removal is entering its “dot-com” moment—full of potential, hype, and uncertainty all at once.
7. Bottom Line
Microsoft is indeed betting on underground sewage injections to clean up its AI footprint, but the viral price tag is educated guesswork, and some science claims in the early coverage were downright wrong.
If the wells work as advertised, they could lock away carbon for millennia and cut methane leaks today. If they don’t, we may simply be moving our mess from the surface to the subsurface—out of sight, but still in the climate ledger.
Stay tuned; the real verdict is likely to emerge not from press releases, but from the rock cores and monitoring wells quietly recording data deep below our feet.