Clean tech offers breath of fresh air for carbon-reliant Canada

Clean tech offers breath of fresh air for carbon-reliant Canada

Ask environmentalists about the Canadian province of Alberta and they will almost certainly mention the oil sands: a 50,000 square mile area with 165bn barrels of crude reserves — the third largest, globally, behind those of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

Dubbed “the world’s most destructive oil operation” by National Geographic magazine, the site has long been deemed a blight on Canada’s environmental record. It also hampers the country’s green ambitions, as oil sands extraction results in high greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet Carbon Engineering, a start-up that has raised $110m in funding and is backed by philanthropist Bill Gates, believes it can burnish Canada’s green reputation by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.

Based in Squamish, a mountain town in British Columbia, the tech group’s pilot facility has been removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it underground since 2015. It says that each of its “direct air capture” facilities can extract 1m tonnes of CO2 a year, “equivalent to the annual emissions of 250,000 average cars or the work of 40m trees”.

Steve Oldham, Carbon Engineering’s chief executive, now believes he can scale up its business in Alberta and neighbouring Saskatchewan, where geological features provide “some of the best locations in the world”