Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, a carbon-tech fund founded by Bill Gates, has given Deep Sky Corp. a US$40-million grant to help the startup develop its direct-air-capture demonstration centre in Alberta, where it will test several technologies.
The money from the big-name climate technology fund, announced Wednesday, gives Montreal-based Deep Sky more than the funding it needs to begin carbon-removal operations at the site by April 1, said Damien Steel, the company’s chief executive officer.
Breakthrough Energy Catalyst invests in projects that employ emerging decarbonization technologies with potential to reach commercial scale. As a grant, the investment does not dilute ownership of the company.
Deep Sky, founded by Hopper Inc. chief executive officer Fred Lalonde, will study eight different direct-air-capture units at a time from various vendors at its complex under construction in Innisfail, Alta., an hour’s drive north of Calgary. Such plants pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, rather than from smokestacks at industrial sites. The carbon dioxide will be piped to a site north of Edmonton, where it will be injected underground.
The investment represents Breakthrough Energy Catalyst’s first in Canada and in direct air capture, the organizations said.
“They looked at Deep Sky because we are IP- [intellectual property] agnostic. And today we’re the only IP-agnostic project developer on the planet focused on direct air capture,” Mr. Steel said in an interview. “They viewed us as a very good way to support the ecosystem, because the whole ecosystem right now is working hard to find creative ways to scale, and scale in an energy-efficient manner.”
At the demonstration site, called Deep Sky Alpha, the company will examine carbon-removal technologies developed by a host of companies for performance measures such as energy efficiency, the absence of waste biproducts and the ability to expand to commercial scale.
The company plans to install the units through the end of next year, with the first ones starting up by April 1. They include equipment from Airhive, Phlair, Greenlyte Carbon Technologies GmbH, Mission Zero Technologies, NEG8 Carbon, Skyrenu Technologies Inc. and Skytree.
“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 DAC achievable,” Mario Fernandez, head of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, said in a statement.
Mr. Gates, the Microsoft Corp. founder, established Breakthrough Energy in 2015 to help meet the global goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The organization has three streams focusing on technology, markets and policy.
The Catalyst portion has raised more than US$1-billion for funding projects in areas such as clean hydrogen production, long-duration energy storage and sustainable aviation fuel manufacturing. The fund also helps developers out with energy-infrastructure and project-development know-how to advance projects from development stages to construction, it says. Some of its funding partners include Bank of America, American Airlines, Bank of Montreal, General Motors and BlackRock Inc.
Deep Sky’s Alberta site is designed to be able to capture up to 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide over 10 years. Mr. Steel said the company will soon announce a virtual power purchase agreement with a renewable energy developer set to begin operations at a new project.
Last month, the company announced it had sold the first carbon credits from the facility to Royal Bank of Canada and Microsoft in a deal that covers the extraction of 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next decade.
