Sarah Sobanski, editor 2024-10-18 01:23:25
Montreal-based carbon project developer wants to pull carbon out of the air and put it back in the ground
Deep Sky, a Montreal-based carbon removal project developer, is launching a $50-million carbon removal innovation and commercialization centre in Western Canada.
Deep Sky Labs, planned for Innisfail, Alta., represents an industry first for the private development of scalable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and the first commercial direct air capture (DAC) project in Canada.
“Imagine the atmosphere is a bathtub overflowing with water. CO2 (carbon dioxide emissions) is the water,” said Phil De Luna, chief carbon scientist and head of engineering with Deep Sky.
“When your bathtub overflows you can do two things, you can turn off the tap… or you can pull the plug.
“Emissions reductions, point-source carbon capture… biofuels, clean energy, electrification; all of it is turning off the tap. It’s reducing the flow of water into the bathtub.
“But your bathtub’s already overflowing. You have to drain it at the same time.”
Deep Sky’s goal is to accelerate the path to low-cost, low-energy intensity and highly scalable CDR to produce high integrity carbon credits — which other companies can use to offset emissions and meet their decarbonization commitments.
Its estimated $50-million centre, on a 50-acre site, will look to get up and running this winter and can test up to 14 different DAC technologies. It’s expected to have the capacity to capture 3,000 tonnes of CO2 per year and operate for two decades.
Airhive, Avnos, Phlair (formerly Carbon Atlantis), Greenlyte Carbon Technologies, Mission Zero, NEG8 Carbon, Skyrenu, and Skytree are eight tech firms from around the world that have already been selected for the project.
“It’s a new space. There are these different kinds of technologies that are being commercialized. They all say they’re the best, but no one has tried them side-byside,” said De Luna.
“Before we build a large-scale commercial facility, we want to try before we buy.”
De Luna said Deep Sky would build commercial facilities for each DAC startup if they all worked, but the likelihood of that is very low.
The best tech will be chosen for a proposed $100-million facility aiming to pull 50,000 to 200,000 tonnes of CO2 from the air annually. Deep Sky is currently sourcing locations in proximity to places it can safely store carbon.
The Innisfail facility, for example, will store the carbon it pulls out of the air at the Meadowbrook Carbon Storage Hub, north of Edmonton. Deep Sky’s storage partner, Bison Low Carbon Ventures, is moving the hub through the province’s regulatory approval process.
Deep Sky is also looking at its own storage projects, including investigating situ mineralization at Thetford Mines and sedimentary storage in Bécancour, Que.
“The idea is that we’re going to build DAC facilities right on top of the storage so that we no longer have to transport it,” said De Luna.
“We literally suck it out of the air and pump it into the ground in the exact same place.”
Deep Sky wants to reach a commercial agreement for the $100-million facility as soon as possible, he said. Construction is targeted for 2027 and operations for 2028.
“We hope to be able to have enough facilities that we’re removing 1 million tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere by 2030,” said De Luna.
Scaling up from capturing and storing up to 3,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, to 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year, in a little more than six years, is a massive undertaking, but De Luna said the world can’t afford to wait.
“There’s a delay in when temperature occurs from when CO2 is emitted. Even if we were to completely turn off the tap today, we would still have 10 to 20 years of warming baked in.
“So we have to take care of the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere. We’re at this temperature now with this amount of CO2, and it’s already getting really bad.”
Climate science agencies estimate up to 10 billion tonnes of CO2 must be removed from the atmosphere annually to keep global warming below the 1.5 C target set in the Paris Agreement.
A late 2023 report by multi-national consultancy, McKinsey and Company, says, “CDR could play a vital role in neutralizing residual emissions” and is likely needed to meet the Paris Agreement’s net-zero goal by mid-century.
Here at home, Canada is emitting about 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.
“(CDR) is not a silver bullet, this is just part of an approach that we need to take in order to reduce emissions,” said De Luna.
“As we continue as a species and we fail at reducing emissions fast enough — every single climate accord from Paris to Kiyoto has not met its targets — the role of direct air carbon capture becomes more and more important.
“This is our insurance policy. This is our backstop.
“If we don’t start developing this technology now, and we don’t scale it to where it needs to be, we won’t have it when we need it the most.”
CDR also has the potential to be highly lucrative.
In its report McKinsey estimates, “A CDR industry capable of delivering gigaton- scale removals at net-zero levels could be worth up to $1.2 trillion by 2050.”
Deep Sky co-founders Joost Ouwerkerk, Fred Lalonde and Laurence Tosi are no strangers to growing new tech from the ground up.
Ouwerkerk and Lalonde co-founded Canadian travel app, Hopper, just shy of two decades ago. Today, it’s the No.1 travel app in more than 70 countries and sells billions of dollars of travel worldwide.
Tosi, managing partner and founder of investment firm, WestCap, is the former chief financial officer of short-term rental giant Airbnb, out of the United States. The multi-billion-dollar company has listings in more than 220 countries and regions.
De Luna said Ouwerkerk and Lalonde started planting trees to offset their tech operations emissions a few years ago.
Big tech companies, such as Amazon, Google and Meta, have large carbon footprints. Powering data centres, incoming artificial intelligence, and other new tech require an enormous amount of electricity and that’s only going to grow, presenting a risk to global climate goals.
Ouwerkerk and Lalonde planted about 30 million trees in three years, De Luna said. That started them on their “climate journey,” along which they realised the world’s climate change models are likely “wrong” and global warming is happening faster than anyone expects.
“We got into this mess by taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air. We have to reverse that and take it out of the air and put it into the ground,” said De Luna.
“We’re an oil and gas company in reverse.”
De Luna said Deep Sky intends to sell its CDR credits to Fortune 500 companies, such as those big tech companies struggling to meet their climate goals.
Since starting about two years ago, Deep Sky has grown to about 30 people and raised more than $75 million in funding, including from Crown corporations. •
Deep Sky Labs will test up to 14 different DAC technologies and look to capture 3,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. | Photo: Deep Sky
Phil De Luna, PhD, chief carbon scientist and head of engineering with Deep Sky.
“If we don’t start developing this technology now, and we don’t scale it to where it needs to be, we won’t have it when we need it the most.” - Phil De Luna
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Phil De Luna explained the process for direct air capture works in three steps:
First, fans pull in air.
Second, CO2 emissions are captured in something absorbent, such as a filter.
Third, the filter is regenerated or cleaned.
“You have to apply energy to your filter to clean it,” he said. “There are all these different variations of chemicals and absorbent materials — that filter can look different.
“The actual process could be different, the way that you move the air can be different.
“What seems simple intuitively — take carbon out of the air and put it underground — when you get down to the engineering there are hundreds, if not thousands of ways to do this. “Finding the right combination to make it cost effective, efficient and easy to operate; that’s what all these different companies are doing.”
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