A Canadian company that received a $40 million grant from Bill Gates’ climate solutions venture capital firm says its Alberta testing site will directly remove carbon from the atmosphere as early as this spring.
Montreal startup deep sky announced Wednesday that it had received funding from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, founded by Gates, to help finance what it calls its Deep Sky Alpha project.
Construction work at the project site, located north of Calgary in the town of Innisfail, is already underway, Deep Sky CEO Damien Steel said in an interview.
“This should be a proud moment for Canada. This facility, in April 2025, will be one of the first comprehensive facilities in North America to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere using renewable energy and store it underground in a deep saline aquifer,” he said. Steel said.
Founded in 2023 by Frédéric Lalonde — the Canadian entrepreneur who co-founded the online travel company Hopper, Inc. — DeepSky aims to combat the global climate crisis by building the world’s first direct-elimination testing and commercialization center. carbon by direct air capture in the world.
It is the first Canadian company to receive an investment from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, which funds commercial projects of emerging climate technologies with the aim of accelerating their adoption and reducing their costs.
“The world will ultimately need many approaches to removing carbon at prices far lower than those achievable today, but Deep Sky’s platform will enable and accelerate the type of real-world innovation that could make (capture direct from the air) at an affordable cost,” Mario Fernandez, head of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, said in a statement.
Direct air capture is a term that refers to the physical removal of excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to slow global warming. This is different from carbon capture and storage, which refers to the capture of carbon from smokestacks or other industrial emission points.
Pulling carbon dioxide directly from the air is seen by its supporters as a way to clean up historic emissions that have already escaped into the atmosphere, meaning it could potentially help reverse the harmful effects of climate change.
The technology typically involves using vacuum cleaners or giant fans to suck in air, then passing it through a filtration system to remove the CO2 and storing it safely underground.
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Companies such as Canadian company Carbon Engineering Ltd. – which was acquired by US company Occidental Petroleum for US$1.1 billion in 2023 – and Swiss company Climeworks already have major projects in Texas and Iceland, respectively.
But even as the number of direct air capture pilot projects around the world increases, the technology remains expensive and faces serious obstacles to large-scale deployment.
“(Direct air capture) is much, much more difficult than (traditional carbon capture and storage) because the density of CO2 in the air is much lower than the density of CO2 in the stack,” he said. Steel said.
“(The industry) also has an energy problem. You need renewable energy to run these devices and we simply don’t have enough renewable energy on the planet. »
At its Innisfail site, Deep Sky says it will pilot up to 14 direct air capture projects from companies around the world, with the aim of seeing which ones work best and could be commercialized. It has already signed contracts with eight companies to deploy their individual technologies at the site.
“There are more than 100 (direct air capture) companies around the world today, and we’ve met with every one of them,” Steel said.
“We’re looking for technologies that have the potential to be very energy efficient, and we’re also looking for technologies that don’t require any particular type of raw material and don’t produce any type of senseless waste.”
Carbon dioxide captured at the Deep Sky site will be transported to an existing well at the Meadowbrook Carbon Storage Facility, north of Edmonton, where it will be injected and stored two kilometers underground.
The entire test center will be powered by renewable energy and Deep Sky intends to generate revenue by selling the carbon credits it earns.
Deep Sky plans to invest more than $100 million in the project over a 10-year period and added that the project will benefit from a federal investment tax credit that aims to encourage the construction of carbon capture in Canada.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recognized that carbon dioxide removal on the scale of millions or even billions of tonnes will be necessary by 2050 to stabilize the world’s climate. the planet.
This is a daunting task, Steel said, given that only a small handful of projects currently exist in the world. Climeworks’ largest Mammoth installation in Iceland has the capacity to capture up to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
But Steel said he believes it is both possible and necessary to rapidly scale up the deployment of direct air capture technology.
“What I like to tell people is that it’s truly amazing what human beings can do when their backs are against the wall,” he said.
© 2024 The Canadian Press