Support strong Canadian climate journalism for 2025
A futuristic-looking complex of giant white buildings that can pull carbon dioxide (CO₂) straight out of the air is set for switch-on in Alberta this spring, following a landmark power purchase agreement (PPA) between U.K. renewables developer Low Carbon and Canadian start-up Deep Sky.
The Deep Sky Alpha project, which is being powered fully by Low Carbon’s Lethbridge solar farm, will use direct air capture systems that look like giant extractor fans to “scrub” 3,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year from the atmosphere and inject it several kilometres underground.
The project will provide a test bed for 10 different direct air capture technologies angling for commercialization, according to Deep Sky, which last year received a $40-million boost from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Catalyst clean tech fund to support the project’s development.
“As a technology-agnostic project developer, we don’t build our own [direct air capture] systems,” Deep Sky spokesman Brooke Wallace told Canada’s National Observer by email. “Instead, we scour the world for the best technologies to deploy at our facilities. This approach decreases delivery and operational risks, while increasing the speed at which the industry can learn, evolve and scale.”
Wallace added that the Alberta complex was designed to compare competing direct air capture technologies for their ability to operate year-round in the Canadian climate before being stepped up to commercial-scale.
Direct air capture is an umbrella term for a range of technologies that extract CO₂ from the air using a combination of physical and chemical processes. These systems differ from conventional carbon capture and storage concepts, which trap emissions at the source, such as a cement plant or refinery, before sequestration.
Direct air capture is seen by proponents as a necessary part of an all-of-the-above technological response to global heating as it reduces carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere as a whole, capturing emissions that originated in non-stationary sources, such as cars, transport trucks and airplanes.
The Low Carbon deal with Deep Sky should be seen as a milestone for renewables-powered carbon removal, said Jordan Dye, director of the Carbon Dioxide Removal Centre at the Pembina Institute, a research house.
“Carbon removal and clean energy are hand-in-glove industries whose partnership makes intrinsic sense,” he said.
“Carbon removal companies exist to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and they need to generate as little carbon as possible in the removal process for the carbon accounting to work. Using wind and solar energy to power their operations is quite simply part of their business model,” said Dye.
Direct air capture, like other carbon capture and storage technologies, has its detractors. Kurt Zenz House and Josh Goldman, co-founders of KoBold Metals, a mining company focused on energy transition materials, and MIT professor Charles Harvey, believe direct air capture is “outrageously expensive” at a time when every climate action dollar spent should go to low-carbon options, including renewable energy technologies.
Cost reduction challenge
Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last year, they pointed to the largest direct air capture project under development on the planet, owned by Occidental Petroleum in Texas, as evidence. This $1-billion plant, which recently landed a $600-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, will capture 500,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year – but at a cost of $500 per tonne.
Though a high-cost technology today, with the price of removing one tonne of CO₂ ranging from $500 to $800, Deep Sky believes it can scale-up direct air capture to slash this figure to around $200/tonne. Wallace noted that CDR.fyi, an open-source initiative that tracks carbon removal credit sales, lists today’s spot price at US$470 (C$675) a tonne of CO₂.
“We believe that carbon removal will become a multi-billion-dollar industry once scaled,” he said, adding the company will use in-house software at Deep Sky Alpha to process operational data to accelerate the commercialization of the direct air capture designs being installed.
Direct air capture technology is energy-intensive to operate. But Low Carbon has an answer for that: as well as being a pioneering technology project, it is also a breakthrough as the first-ever power purchase agreement – a long-term contract between an electricity generator and a customer – for a carbon removal project in Canada.
“We expect that [power purchase agreements] will continue to play a major role in helping drive the renewables revolution in the coming years, as organizations explore innovative finance options that help reduce emissions from their energy usage and decarbonize the wider economy,” Low Carbon’s head of power management, Marco Verspuij, told Canada’s National Observer in an email.
One of the largest direct air capture projects in this fast-evolving market is Iceland’s Mammoth plant, a geothermal-powered facility that started operating last May and is able to capture 36,000 tons of CO₂ per year for subterranean storage – 10 times that of Deep Sky Alpha. Its developer, Switzerland’s Climeworks, is targeting daily carbon removal at the megatonne (1,000 tonnes) level by 2030 and gigaton scale by mid-century.
Comments
This article appears to have been constructed primarily from a couple of press releases. First, though, is a question of how many tonnes is, in fact, in a megaton.
The article says “(1,000 tonnes)” but isn’t that a kilotonne? A megaton is, I believe, one million tonnes; a gigatonne is one billion tonnes.
I don’t understand the hoopla accorded in the article to a power purchase agreement; any sizeable consumer of energy will likely try to nail down such an agreement. And is a quote from the Pembina Institute really needed to point out the obvious? That said, however, given that the purpose of this this project is to compare, at very small scale, the efficacy of a range of methodologies for DACC, it may be worthwhile to power it with coal/ gas-fired electricity generation: a small amount of harm to enable ostensibly huge, long-term benefits. Not ideal but not a big deal in the grand scheme.
In brief, the single, salient take-away in what was presented, in my view, is that there’s a project being constructed that will facilitate the comparison of multiple candidate DACC technologies. Full stop.
What would have been an interesting addition is why the project is being built in Alberta, or even Canada?
True; this is a R and D project(research and development)
It will remove 3 000 tonnes of CO2; that's peanuts! To be effective for climate control, you must add at least nine zeros at the end this number.(3 000 000 000 000 tonnes)
But the best way to deal with too much carbon in the atmosphere is to leave it in the ground, Carbon capture (CCS) and Direct air capture are«needed» because humanity has failed to «leave it in the ground» .
If it is to be effective as a climate policy( and not just a PR gimmick), the promoters of Direct Air Capture must answer one fundamental question; a) we know that there are about 420 PPM(parts per million) of carbon in the atmosphere, b) science shows that mankind must remove hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, HOW MANY QUADRILLIONS TONNES OF ATMOSPHERE MUST BE SCRUBBED????
If they don't answer that question, then Direct Air Capture (and CCS) are just high priced delaying tactics !