Alberta’s Deep Sky Alpha facility is pulling carbon from the air in a risky political environment

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In the rolling farmland of central Alberta, a unique testing site for technology designed to extract carbon dioxide from the air is powering up against political winds that have shifted since its developer broke ground a year ago.

Deep Sky Corp., a Montreal-based startup, is building its $50-million-plus Deep Sky Alpha project to examine a range of direct-air capture, or DAC, units from different vendors to see which might be best suited for full-scale facilities across Canada.

DAC has its supporters and detractors, and Deep Sky chief executive officer Alex Petre does not shy away from addressing the criticism, including the sheer number of facilities needed to remove massive volumes of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. She sees it as one of many weapons required in the battle against climate change.

“We fundamentally believe that we should explore every single pathway,” Ms. Petre said last week during a walkaround at the facility, located on the outskirts of Innisfail, about an hour’s drive north of Calgary.

“However, we believe that when things get bad enough, this is going to be the most credible and most affordable solution for actual carbon removal. What we want to do is make sure that we’re the ones who provide that product that’s as low-cost and as good as possible.”

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Deep Sky is set to announce Wednesday that it has fired up three of its DAC units, marking the facility’s formal opening. They were developed by Skyrenu Technologies Inc. of Quebec and two British companies, Mission Zero Technologies and Airhive.

Four additional units are slated to start by the end of the year, and more in 2026. Deep Sky is opening Alpha about two years after Fred Lalonde, founder of the online travel agency Hopper Inc., established the company.

The objective is putting the technologies through their paces to study and compare energy use, overall efficiency, durability and scalability. They must also have no waste products.

Arranged in a grid, the units are connected to a central facility for collecting the gas so it can be trucked to a Northern Alberta storage hub then injected deep underground. It gets its electricity via a power-purchase agreement with a solar generator.

DAC facilities elsewhere have completed various phases along the chain, including capturing the CO2, processing it and injecting the gas underground for storage.

“However, this is the first time you see the entire end-to-end process, and also the very first time where we have a facility that has multiple direct-air capture vendors actually participating in the process,” Ms. Petre said.

Deep Sky is moving to its operational phase with the political environment for cleantech such as DAC looking uncertain. In the United States, expansion of the technology – at least as a climate-change-fighting tool – is up in the air as the Trump administration moves to cancel climate-related subsidies that were championed by former president Joe Biden.

The US$1.3-billion Stratos carbon-removal plant in Texas being built by Occidental Petroleum Corp. using technology developed by B.C.-based Carbon Engineering is proceeding. Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub has stressed to U.S. President Donald Trump its potential enhanced oil recovery – injecting the extracted CO2 into aging reservoirs to push out more crude. Meanwhile, a major DAC facility planned for Louisiana by Swiss-based Climeworks is in question.

In Canada, DAC projects remain eligible for recently established investment tax credits for carbon capture, though some critics say the technology has the potential to create cover for more fossil-fuel production, and hence CO2 emissions.

But the window for proving that projects can be developed to scale is small, and suited to a startup looking to find the efficiencies even if it doesn’t have the balance sheet of a major company, Ms. Petre said.

“If you think about all of the super-early industries, the really big product innovations usually happen when a smaller group of people get together and really tackle the problem, and I think that’s what Deep Sky tries to be. Obviously, for commercial facilities we will have to figure out funding, but at the same time we do fundamentally believe we’re going to create something different that will attract that funding,” she said.

That could involve financing or seeking partners for much larger facilities when Deep Sky lands on its preferred technology. For now, it is focused on Canada owing to its geological capacity for carbon storage, ample clean energy sources and a highly skilled work force, she said.

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Ms. Petre stepped into her current role this spring after Damien Steel, the company’s initial CEO, resigned, citing personal reasons. Her résumé includes stints at asset-management giant BlackRock Inc., as chief operating officer of Bird Canada as the electric scooter company launched operations, then landing at Deep Sky last year as chief operating officer.

The through-line for those jobs has been a focus on sustainability, she said. Moving to Calgary in 2019, she was troubled by the increasing wildfire smoke each summer. This and other weather-related calamities around the world sharpened her focus on climate solutions.

“A lot of these natural disasters happened because of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. What this solution is working on,” she said, strolling among the DAC units, “is reducing that concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

Of course, Alpha won’t accomplish that on its own. When fully operational, it will capture 3,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, equivalent to removing about 650 cars from the road.

But that’s not the point. After test-driving the current range of DAC units, Deep Sky plans to replace them with demonstration plants from other vendors to try out more technology, aiming to arrive at the optimum CO2 removal process.

The site is supported by the carbon credits it generates. Last year, the company sold its first credits to Royal Bank of Canada and Microsoft Corp., covering CO2 removals of 10,000 tonnes over 10 years.

Also in 2024, Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, a carbon-tech fund founded by Bill Gates, gave Deep Sky a US$40-million grant to help set the startup through its development phase.

Despite the uncertain political environment, especially in the U.S., there remains strong demand for high-quality carbon credits – those that guarantee CO2 is buried virtually forever – among global companies looking to reduce their climate impact, she said.

Now, with the Alpha site moving into an operations phase, Ms. Petre sees her role as making sure the plant runs smoothly, and sets the company up for its next stage – opening commercial-scale DAC plants across the country.

“I have a very deep background in operations. I have previously taken a company from zero operations, zero employees, zero revenue, to being stable and profitable,” she said. “I want to apply the same laser-eye focus on operations to Deep Sky. I think the industry could benefit from being a lot more execution- and operations-focused.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Vicki Hollub's name.