This article appears in the inaugural issue of BetaKit Most Ambitious. Go here to read more stories of bold ambition in Canadian tech.
Phil De Luna had been studying carbon removal for years when he met Fred Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk, the co-founders of Hopper.
“We’re an oil and gas company in reverse. Our ambition is to reverse climate change.”
The pair had been looking for a way to offset the carbon impact of their travel platform, and had just founded Deep Sky, a company that planned to remove carbon from the atmosphere, quickly (Laurence Tosi, former CFO of Airbnb, is also a co-founder).
Today, De Luna is Deep Sky’s chief science and commercial officer, tasked with bringing this goal to life.
In less than two years, Deep Sky has opened its first site—Deep Sky Alpha—in Innisfail, AB, with funding from Bill Gates’ climate fund.
BetaKit spoke to De Luna about the company’s goals and his own motivation.
What is Deep Sky trying to do?
We’re an oil and gas company in reverse. Our ambition is to reverse climate change. If you believe the science, which we do, we need about 10 billion tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere per year by 2050.
Shouldn’t we just stop emitting C02?
Direct capture is not a replacement for emission reduction. We have to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. But there’s always going to be about 10 to 15 percent of the emissions that are impossible to abate.
We’re not gonna stop flying people and goods around the world. We’re not gonna be having a plane that runs on hydrogen because we had zephyrs before and they exploded.
We are also failing horribly at reducing our emissions. And as we continue to fail, the role of removing it from the atmosphere becomes more and more important.
It’s our backstop. It’s our insurance policy. If we don’t start developing this now, we’re not gonna have it when we need it.
There are a lot of Canadian carbon capture companies. What’s going on?
We have enough storage capacity to reverse climate change here in Canada. Every ton of CO2 we’ve emitted since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we can store here.
Canada is actually the best place in the world to do direct air capture. We have the right geologic storage, we have a lot of clean hydro power, we have an oil and gas sector with a talented workforce and skills that we could use to do the same thing, but in reverse.
And we have really good policies. Canada has the world’s first government-backed Direct Capture Protocol, the world’s first government procurement program, and the world’s first investment tax credit for direct capture.
Canada punches above its weight in terms of science and innovation generally. Some of the first patents in carbon capture technology were here in Canada. We have world-leading universities that have been developing this stuff for a long, long time.
We’re a natural resource-based economy, and oil and gas are a serious part of our economy. And I think the government recognizes that we have to find a way to preserve the economic livelihoods of Western Canadians as we go through this energy transition. Carbon capture is one way to reduce the emission content of these industries while allowing for a more equitable transition over time.
You were thinking about building your own company when you met the Deep Sky founders. What made you join them?
I’ve been working in carbon capture for over a decade. My master’s was on computational simulations for new materials to capture CO2 from flue stacks. I have over 50 papers published in this space. So I’ve been surrounded by really smart technology people, PhDs, engineers. But it’s very rare that they ever actually make it.
When you’re in academia, you think, ‘Oh, if I just make the best hammer, then I will find the right nail.’ But actually, you have to understand why people want to buy your hammer, and you have to ask them to show you the house they’re trying to build.
With the Deep Sky founders, they’ve actually built a billion-dollar business before. Their pitch was, ‘We’ve built businesses. You know the science. Let’s learn together.’
Climate isn’t a technology problem. Given enough time, enough money, you can solve it. What’s difficult is the policy and financing and project development and energy and storage space.
Sucking CO2 out of the air seems difficult. How do you do it?
There’s three steps. You have a fan that moves air through some sort of filter that captures the CO2. Then you compress that filter using energy, and you inject it underground.
We go to places that are very stable geologic formations. They’re not near any fault lines. We wouldn’t be doing this off the coast of California.
The Earth naturally has stores of gas and liquid underground, so we know that it’s stable and it can stay there. There’s never been a leakage. Western Canada is a perfect place to do it.
What do you think scaled your ability to do hard things?
I’m Filipino. I moved to Canada when I was five years old.
My dad was an engineer in the Philippines, and my mom was a nutritional scientist.
When they moved here, my dad became an auto worker and my mom worked in customer service. They gave up a lot of their lives to give me and my sister a better life. So a lot of what motivated me when I started was making that sacrifice worth it.
What’s the lesson there for other people?
I wasn’t born wealthy or with resources. I was born with an ability to communicate and a brain, and I found a niche in an area where I can make an impact.
I guess my advice would be, understand what it is you’re trying to accomplish and why you’re doing what you’re doing, because it’s a lot easier to keep motivated and be ambitious when times are tough when you have a North Star.
What’s your North Star?
The scary thing about climate change is there’s a delay between emissions and temperature rise, and that delay is 10 to 50 years. So that means that the warming that we’re experiencing today is from a decade ago, and that also means that if you stop emissions today, then we still have 10 years of warming baked in.
At what point did you decide you could reverse that process with science?
During my undergrad, I went to a conference and I saw a professor speak about materials to capture CO2 from the air. I thought it was really interesting, so I went up to the guy after and I asked if I could do research for him, and he said yes.
But we just didn’t click. He told me I wasn’t good enough to do my PhD with him.
I thought, ‘Well, no, I think I am.’
And so I applied to every school in the world. The thing that actually ended up propelling me into this field was proving this professor wrong.
Spite is a very powerful motivator.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Feature image courtesy Deep Sky.
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