Montréal-based cleantech startup Deep Sky announced that its pilot carbon-capture facility in Innisfail, Alta., is now operational in what it calls a first for North America.
Deep Sky Alpha, a direct air capture (DAC) facility roughly an hour away from Calgary, began pulling carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air today for underground storage in a milestone that the company has been chasing since its inception.
“In just one year, we went from breaking ground to pulling carbon from the sky and locking it underground for good,” Deep Sky CEO Alex Petre said in a statement.
Alex Petre
“In just one year, we went from breaking ground to pulling carbon from the sky and locking it underground for good.”
Deep Sky
Deep Sky was founded in 2022 by Hopper co-founders Frederic Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk. It aims to use DAC technology to remove carbon from the air, ultimately hoping to reduce the burden of fossil-fuel emissions and mitigate climate change, while also monetizing it by selling carbon credits to large companies hoping to offset their carbon footprints.
Companies such as Microsoft and the Royal Bank of Canada have already purchased carbon credits from Deep Sky worth about 10,000 tonnes of stored CO2 over 10 years.
The CO2 captured at Deep Sky Alpha is permanently stored in deep rock formations called saline aquifers. The company estimates that Deep Sky Alpha, which is powered by solar energy, can capture 3,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere by the end of the year. Canadians emit about three tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per capita each year, according to Statistics Canada, so this reduction would roughly represent the carbon footprint of 1,000 people.
Deep Sky’s former chief scientist, Phil De Luna, previously said at June’s BetaKit Town Hall: Most Ambitious event that 10 billion tons of CO2 would need to be removed from the atmosphere per year by 2050 to reverse human-made climate change. Deep Sky claims it will remove up to 30,000 tons of CO2 from the air in its first 10 years.
Though some climate change experts have argued that DAC technologies are not efficient enough to mitigate the adverse effects of carbon emissions, the Canadian government has so far been supportive of this CO2 reduction strategy. In July, Natural Resources Canada announced more than $21.5 million for carbon capture and storage technologies in Alberta, including several projects from legacy oil and gas companies.
RELATED: Deep Sky science chief Phil De Luna departs company to “build something new”
De Luna, who departed Deep Sky last month to pursue new opportunities, is not the only executive to depart in recent months. Former COO Alex Petre replaced founding CEO Damien Steele in the top job earlier this year when he left for personal reasons.
The Deep Sky Alpha site plans to eventually provide infrastructure for several different DAC technologies that will be tested and validated before launching commercially. Three DAC units are currently in operation at the facility from Québec-based Skyrenu Technologies as well as British companies Airhive and Mission Zero Technologies. Skyrenu closed just under $2 million in pre-seed financing from Investissement Québec in June, the startup confirmed to BetaKit.
The site’s official operation has been pushed back a few times since its announcement in August 2024. Alpha was originally meant to open this past winter, but Deep Sky revised the operational schedule to target a spring opening before moving it to this summer. The project created more than 110 construction jobs and will have roughly 15 full-time operators, the company said.
Deep Sky has raised more than $130 million from investors, including a $40-million USD ($57.3 million CAD) grant from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, a climate solution-focused funding platform.
Feature image courtesy Deep Sky.