Bill Gates invests in Montreal company looking to remove CO2 from air

financialpost.com:

Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is awarding US$40 million to Montreal-based Deep Sky to help it test its carbon removal technology in Alberta.

Damien Steel, chief executive of Deep Sky, said the company is building a roughly $100-million pilot plant in Innisfail, Alta., about a one-hour drive north of Calgary, where it plans to test eight different technologies that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air.

“Our single greatest focus, our mission, is to drive down the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere,” he said.

Breakthrough Energy Catalyst helps companies scale up and deploy technologies and advises the companies it grants funding and invests in.

Gates has talked about the “catastrophic” effects of greenhouse gas emissions, but he’s “optimistic” that humans can stop climate change because of his belief in innovation.

“That’s what Breakthrough Energy is all about,” he said in a video on Breakthrough Energy Catalyst’s website.

Steel, a former executive at OMERS Ventures, said Deep Sky was founded about a year ago and is technology-agnostic. It wants to be a developer of carbon removal projects — known as direct air capture (DAC) — but is not inventing the underlying technology itself.

Since founding the company, he said his team of about 30 people studied roughly 100 different technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the air so that it can be buried and stored underground, and then picked the eight most promising technologies to install and test at the Alpha project.

Of course, such technology faces many challenges, including finding an economic framework.

Currently, Deep Sky is relying on what Steel described as the “voluntary market.” He said he expects climate change will worsen, so companies and