A Montreal company that wants to build a test site for carbon capture technologies has received a US$40 million grant from Bill Gates’ venture capital firm.
Posted at 1:29 p.m.
Updated at 6:03 p.m.
Amanda Stephenson
The Canadian Press
Canadian startup Deep Sky announced Wednesday that it had received a grant from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst to help it build its Deep Sky Alpha project in Alberta.
Construction work at the project site, located north of Calgary in the town of Innisfail, is already underway, said Damien Steel, CEO of Deep Sky, in an interview.
“This is a proud moment for Canada. In April 2025, this facility will be one of the first in North America to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere using renewable energy and store it underground in a deep saline aquifer,” says Mr. Steel.
Founded in 2023 by Fred Lalonde, the Canadian entrepreneur who co-founded online travel company Hopper, DeepSky aims to tackle the global climate crisis by building the world’s first phase-out testing and commercialization center of carbon dioxide by direct capture from the air in the world.
It is the first Canadian company to receive an investment from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, which funds commercial projects for emerging climate technologies with the goal of accelerating their adoption and reducing their costs.
“The planet will need a multitude of solutions at prices much lower than today. The Deep Sky platform will accelerate the development of concrete innovations likely to make direct air capture affordable,” said Mario Fernandez, head of the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program, in a press release.
Direct air capture refers to the physical removal of excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in order to slow climate change. It is different from carbon capture and storage, which refers to the direct capture of carbon from industrial smokestacks or other emission points.
Extracting carbon dioxide directly from the air is seen by its proponents 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.
This technology typically involves using vacuum cleaners or giant fans to suck in air and pass it through a filtration system to extract CO₂ and store it safely underground.
Companies such as Canadian company Carbon Engineering – 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 while the number of direct air capture pilot projects is increasing around the world, the technology remains expensive and faces significant obstacles to being deployed on a large scale.
“(Direct air capture) is 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,” Mr. Steel.
“(The industry) also faces an energy problem. It takes renewable energy to run these devices and we simply don’t have enough renewable energy on the planet. »
A testing site
At its Innisfail site, Deep Sky will pilot up to 14 direct air capture projects from companies around the world to determine 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 now more than 100 (direct air capture) companies in the world, and we have met them all,” says Steel.
“We’re looking for technologies that are likely to be very energy efficient, and we’re also looking for technologies that don’t require any special raw materials and don’t produce any special waste. »
Carbon dioxide captured at the Deep Sky site will be transported to an existing well at the Meadowbrook Carbon Storage Hub facility, north of Edmonton, where it will be injected and stored two kilometers underground.
The entire testing center will be powered by renewable energy, and Deep Sky intends to generate revenue by selling the carbon credits it obtains.
Deep Sky plans to invest more than $100 million in the project over a ten-year period, and adds that the project would benefit from a federal investment tax credit aimed at encouraging the construction of carbon capture facilities in Canada.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recognized that carbon dioxide removal on a scale of millions or even billions of tonnes will be necessary by 2050 to stabilize the world’s climate. planet.
This is a daunting task, Steel says, given that there are currently only a small handful of projects in the world. The largest, Climeworks’ Mammoth facility in Iceland, has a capacity to capture 36,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year.
However, Steel 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 concludes.
