Canadian carbon removal company scores US$40M grant from fund backed by Bill Gates

Damien Steel, right, Deep Sky CEO and Isabelle Callaghan, Deep Sky Project Manager, are seen posing for a photo at Deep Sky's direct air capture test facility, which is currently under construction, in Innisfail, Alta., in a 2024 handout photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Deep Sky

A Canadian company that has received a US$40-million grant from Bill Gates' climate solutions venture firm says its Alberta test site will be removing carbon directly from the atmosphere as early as this spring.

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Montreal-based startup Deep Sky announced Wednesday it was awarded funding from the Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Catalyst 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 under way, Deep Sky CEO Damien Steel said in an interview.

"This should be a proud moment for Canada. This facility in April of 2025 will be one of the first full-stack facilities in North America to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere using renewable power, and store it underground in a deep saline aquifer," Steel said.

Founded in 2023 by Frederic Lalonde — the Canadian entrepreneur who co-founded online travel company Hopper, Inc. — DeepSky aims to tackle the global climate crisis by building the world's first direct air capture carbon removal test hub and commercialization centre.

It is the first Canadian company to receive an investment from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, which funds commercial projects for emerging climate technologies in an effort to accelerate their adoption and reduce their costs.

"The world will ultimately need many approaches to carbon removal at prices far lower than is achievable today, but Deep Sky's platform will enable and accelerate the kind of real-world innovation that could make affordable (direct air capture) achievable," Mario Fernandez, head of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, said in a release.

Direct air capture is a term that refers to physically removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to slow global warming. It is different from carbon capture and storage, which refers to capturing carbon from smokestacks or other industrial emission points.

Pulling carbon dioxide directly from the air is seen by proponents as a way to clean up historic emissions that have already escaped into the atmosphere, meaning it could potentially help reverse the damaging impacts of climate change.

The technology typically involves the use of giant vacuums or fans to suck in air and then pass it through a filtration system to remove the CO2 for safe storage underground.

Companies such as Canada's Carbon Engineering Ltd. — which was acquired by U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum for US$1.1 billion in 2023 — and Switzerland's Climeworks already have major projects in Texas and Iceland, respectively.

But while the number of direct air capture pilot projects around the world is growing, the technology remains expensive and faces steep barriers to wide-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 chimney stack," Steel said.

"(The industry) also has an energy problem. You need renewable power to run these devices and we just don't have enough renewable power on the planet."

At its Innisfail site, Deep Sky says it will be piloting up to 14 direct air capture projects from companies around the world, in an effort to see 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 over 100 (direct air capture) companies in the world today, and we've met with every single one," Steel said.

"We're looking for technologies that have a path to being very energy efficient, and we also look for technology that doesn't require any special type of feedstock and doesn't produce any crazy type of 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 kilometres underground.

The entire test hub 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 over $100 million in the project over a 10-year period, and added the project will benefit from a federal investment tax credit that aims to incentivize the construction of carbon capture facilities in Canada.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has acknowledged that carbon dioxide removal at the scale of millions or even billions of tonnes will be necessary by 2050 in order to stabilize the planet's climate.

That is a daunting task, Steel said, given only a small handful of projects currently exist worldwide. The largest, Climeworks' Mammoth facility in Iceland, has capacity to capture just up to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 annually.

But Steel said he believes it is both possible and necessary to rapidly scale up the deployment of direct air capture technology.

"What I love to tell people is, it's truly incredible what human beings can do when their backs are against the wall," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 18, 2024.