Deep Sky, the Canadian carbon removal project developer, has sold carbon removal credits to its founding buyers including Royal Bank of Canada and Microsoft.
In return, Deep Sky intends to facilitate the removal of 10,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere over a 10-year period via Deep Sky Labs, the world’s first carbon removal innovation and commercialization center.
The founding buyers are helping to support Deep Sky Labs’ mission to accelerate the path to low cost, low energy intensity and scalable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and marks an industry milestone for the private development of scalable carbon removal technologies. The agreement calls for Deep Sky to deliver an initial 10,000 tonnes of removals with options to purchase an additional 1 million tonnes from Deep Sky’s pipeline of commercial projects.
Deep Sky Labs represents a single destination to streamline efforts to help combat the climate crisis and is the first commercial direct air capture project in Canada. It’s where multiple Direct Air Capture (DAC) technologies convene for the first time to measure their performance through category benchmarking. Here, the technologies will be tested and optimized for performance year-round in the Canadian climate and validated before committing to them at commercial scale. Proprietary Deep Sky software will track and benchmark all operational data to accelerate the R&D of technology partners and the industry at large.
To start, eight DAC technologies will be deployed side-by-side at Deep Sky Labs, with full access to renewable power and permanent carbon storage to enable the life cycle analysis required to support the production of verified carbon removal credits validated by third-party carbon registries. Labs’ tech-agnostic nature decreases delivery and operational risks while increasing the speed at which the industry can scale. This novel approach attempts to solve for the delivery delays that have plagued past global carbon removal projects. The approach allows buyers to have an impact on the development of multiple DAC technologies through a single purchase of carbon removal credits. The selection of DAC partners is a result of an evaluation of nearly 100 technologies from all over the world. Air processing units with a pathway to low energy intensity, simplicity and scalability were prioritized and selected for piloting.
These DAC providers include Airhive, Avnos, Phlair (formerly Carbon Atlantis), Greenlyte, Mission Zero, NEG8 Carbon, Skyrenu, and Skytree. Together, the partners represent some of the world’s foremost CO2 carbon removal technologies, convening for the first time in Canada.
