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Deep SkyImage: Emily Pontecorvo<\/p>\nFour years ago, Congress hatched an ambitious, bipartisan plan for the United States to become the epicenter of a new climate change-fighting industry. Like an idea ripped from science fiction, the government committed $3.5 billion to develop hulking steel complexes equipped with industrial fans that would filter planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air.<\/p>\n
That vision \u2014 to build regional hubs for \u201cdirect air capture\u201d \u2014 is now languishing under the Trump administration. But a similar, albeit privately-funded initiative in Canada has raced ahead. In the span of about 12 months, a startup called Deep Sky transformed a vacant five-acre lot in Central Alberta into an operational testing ground for five different prototypes of the technology, with more on the way. <\/p>\n
I had been following the project since early last year, after receiving roughly a dozen press releases from Deep Sky about all of the companies it was setting up partnerships with. But it was hard to believe the scope of the ambition until I saw it with my own eyes.<\/p>\n
CarbonCapture Inc., one of the companies piloting its technology at Deep Sky, had originally planned to deploy in the U.S., but has since packed up and headed north. The Los Angeles-based startup recently shipped all the equipment for its first demonstration project from Arizona to the Deep Sky site on four flatbed trucks. On a crisp October day, under a bluebird sky, the company\u2019s CEO Adrian Corless stood in front of the newly installed towering mass of metal fans and explained the move.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of what\u2019s been going on in the U.S. and the backing away from support of climate technology and carbon removal, we made a decision back in February that we were going to redirect our focus and effort to Canada,\u201d he told an audience of Canadian officials who had come to see the tech up close.<\/p>\n
\u201cEight weeks ago, this was just dirt,\u201d Corless said. \u201cToday, we\u2019re actually going to bring the first of our modules to life.\u201d Then he invited Danielle Smith, Alberta\u2019s conservative Premier, to do the honors. She pointed her fingers like a pistol and yelled, \u201cHit it!\u201d <\/p>\n
Behind her, the fans started to whir.<\/p>\n
Deep Sky is not like other companies working in direct air capture, or DAC. Whereas most startups are developing their own patented designs and then raising money to go out and build demonstrations, Deep Sky is solely a project developer. It buys DAC systems, operates them, and sells credits based on the amount of carbon it\u2019s able to remove from the air and sequester underground. Other companies buy these credits to offset their own emissions.<\/p>\n
In the spring of 2024, Damien Steel, Deep Sky\u2019s then-CEO, explained the theory of the case to me. It takes a different set of skills to engineer the tech than to deploy it in the real world, he said, which requires procuring energy to run the system and developing storage sites for the captured CO2. \u201cThere\u2019s a reason why renewable developers don\u2019t build their own windmills and solar panels,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n
DAC technology is nowhere near as advanced as solar panels or wind turbines. Removing carbon dioxide from the air, where it makes up just 0.04% of the total volume, is currently far too energy-intensive to be commercially viable. There are more than 100 companies around the world trying to crack it. <\/p>\n
Deep Sky\u2019s first ambition was to buy a bunch of prototypes, test them next to each other, and figure out which were the most promising. Steel told me he was in the process of acquiring 10 unique DAC systems to install at a \u201ccommercialization and innovation center\u201d known as Deep Sky Labs.<\/p>\n
By the end of that summer, the company had signed a lease for the site in Alberta. Less than a year later, this past June, it had completed initial construction and was ready to begin hooking up DAC systems. In August, it announced that it had successfully injected its first captured carbon into an underground storage well. I had never seen one DAC project in the real world, let alone five. The company suggested I come for a tour during CarbonCapture\u2019s launch event in late October.<\/p>\n
By then Steel, who joined Deep Sky after more than a decade in venture capital, had stepped down from the CEO role \u201cfor personal reasons,\u201d he wrote in a LinkedIn post, though he stayed on as an advisor. My guide would be his successor, former Chief Operating Officer Alex Petre.<\/p>\n
Deep Sky Labs, now called Deep Sky Alpha, is in Innisfail, a town of about 8,000 people surrounded by farmland and prairie. To get there, I flew to Calgary and drove 75 miles north on Highway 2, the primary throughway that connects to Edmonton. Innisfail is dense and suburban-looking, with an industrial corridor on the western edge of town. Deep Sky was on its outermost edge, on the site of a former sewage lagoon the town had recently reclaimed, and sat catty corner to a welding and manufacturing company, which, as I was later told \u2014 multiple times \u2014 was developing hydrogen-powered locomotives.<\/p>\n
A bright white cylindrical building about the size of an airplane hangar, emblazoned with \u201cDeep Sky\u201d in big black letters, was visible from half a mile away. As I pulled up to the site, workers in neon vests and hard hats were scurrying among outcroppings of pipes and metal structures. Unsure of where to enter, I parked on the road and wandered up to some trailers outside the perimeter. Petre poked her head out of one and beckoned me inside an office, where she fitted me with my own vest and hard hat so I could get a closer look.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the only place in the world where we are putting together different direct air capture technologies side by side,\u201d she told me, as we passed through a gate and began walking the grounds. Other than the sound of trucks and excavators driving around, it was fairly quiet. None of the DAC units were operating that day \u2014 one was down for maintenance, one for the winter, and the rest were still under construction. <\/p>\n
The first stop on the tour was a modest black shipping container labeled SkyRenu, a DAC company based in Quebec. It was the smallest system there, designed to capture just 50 tons of carbon per year \u2014 roughly the annual emissions from a dozen cars. Directly across from it, workers appeared to be fitting some pipe on a much larger and more complicated structure resembling Paris\u2019 Pompidou Center. This was United Kingdom-based AirHive\u2019s system, which would have the capacity to capture about 1,000 tons per year once completed.<\/p>\n
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DAC systems are feats of chemistry and mechanical engineering. At their core is a special material called a sorbent, a liquid or solid designed to attract carbon dioxide molecules like a magnet. The process is generally as follows:. First, the sorbent is exposed to the air, often with the help of fans. Once saturated with carbon, the sorbent is heated or zapped with electricity to pry loose the CO2. The resulting pure CO2 gas then gets piped to a processing facility, where it\u2019s prepared for its ultimate destination, whether that\u2019s a product like cement or fuel or, in the case of Deep Sky, a deep underground rock formation where it will be stored permanently.<\/p>\n
Deep Sky\u2019s aim was to trial as many iterations of the tech as it could at Alpha, Petre told me. That\u2019s because what works best in Alberta\u2019s climate won\u2019t necessarily be optimal in Quebec or British Columbia, let alone hotter, more humid zones. \u201cWhen the feedstock, which is ambient air, ends up being so different, we need multiple different technologies to work,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
Case in point: A DAC system designed by Mission Zero, another U.K company, was offline the day I visited \u2014 and would remain so until next spring. It utilized a liquid sorbent and had to be drained so that the sorbent wouldn\u2019t freeze when temperatures dropped below freezing overnight. The challenge wasn\u2019t entirely unique to Mission Zero, however. \u201cEveryone is struggling with winter,\u201d Petre told me.<\/p>\n
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Alpha is piloting systems with liquid sorbents and solid sorbents, variations on the chemistry within each of those, and systems that use different processes to release the carbon after the fact. The development cost ran to \u201cover $50 million\u201d Canadian, Petre told me. The company raised about that amount in a Series A back in 2023. It also won a $40 million grant from Bill Gates\u2019 venture capital firm Breakthrough Energy in December 2024, and this past June, the Province of Alberta awarded Deep Sky an additional $5 million from an emissions-reduction fund paid for by fees on the fossil fuel industry.<\/p>\n
The company fully owns and operates almost all of the DAC units onsite, although it\u2019s still working with the vendors to troubleshoot issues and sharing data with them to improve performance. <\/p>\n
When it comes to Carbon Capture Inc., however, the arrangement is a bit different. Deep Sky has agreed to host the company\u2019s tech, giving it access to power, water, and underground CO2 storage, but CarbonCapture will retain ownership and help with operations, and the two companies will share the proceeds from any revenue the unit generates. <\/p>\n
Petre said the structure was mutually beneficial \u2014 Deep Sky gets to demonstrate its strengths as a full-service site developer, while CarbonCapture gets access to a plug-and-play spot to pilot its system in the real world. The U.S. company is also looking to expand in Canada. \u201cThere\u2019s lots of potential collaboration down the line,\u201d Petre said.<\/p>\n
Before Trump arrived at the White House, CarbonCapture had been making aggressive plans to grow in the states. In the fall of 2022, before the company had even demonstrated its tech outside of a lab, it announced that it would build a project capable of removing 5 million tons of carbon per year<\/a> in Wyoming by 2030. It later leased an 83,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Arizona to produce the equipment for the project. <\/p>\n At the time, the Biden administration was integrating carbon removal \u2014 of which DAC is just one variety<\/a> \u2014 into its \u201cwhole-of-governement\u201d climate strategy. The Department of Energy rebranded its Office of Fossil Energy<\/a> to reflect a new focus on \u201ccarbon management,\u201d a broad term that encompasses carbon captured at fossil fuel plants as well as from the atmosphere. In addition to overseeing the development of the DAC Hubs, the agency was running more than a dozen other grant programs and research initiatives mandated by Congress that were intended to help the nascent industry get established in the U.S. Biden\u2019s 2022 climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, also increased the tax credit available to DAC projects from $50 for every ton of carbon stored underground to $180.<\/p>\n As helpful as all of that may have been for the nascent industry, Canada was arguably going further. In 2022, the country finalized its own tax credit \u2014 an investment tax credit \u2014 that would cover 60% of the capital cost of building a direct air capture plant. The approach, while inspired by the U.S. subsidy, is geared more at de-risking project development than rewarding project success. The following year, the province of Alberta said it would offer an additional 12% investment tax credit on top of that. <\/p>\n
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CarbonCapture Inc.\u2019s Project TamarackImage: Emily Pontecorvo<\/p>\n