Bill Gates funds startup to remove CO2 from atmosphereBill Gates

Virendra Singh Rawat

Breakthrough Energy, the clean-tech venture of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has granted $40 million to carbon-capture startup Deep Sky Corp.

The Montreal-based company targets to build gigantic facilities to remove atmospheric carbon, aimed at mitigating the risk of climate change.

Deep Sky Corp, spearheaded by Hopper Inc CEO Frederic Lalonde, plans to offer millions of tons of CO2 removal that will be stored underground.

Hopper Inc is an air-travel app company and ranks among Canada’s most valuable tech firms.
The funds from Breakthrough Energy’s Catalyst program will be allocated to construct Deep Sky’s maiden plant in Innisfail, Alberta.

This facility, requiring an investment exceeding $70 million, will test and identify technologies, and expand. Additional potential storage projects ware proposed in Quebec.

Deep Sky anticipates the start of operations and the delivery of carbon credits in 2025.

In November, the firm announced it had sold credits to Microsoft Corp and Royal Bank of Canada.

In conjunction with Breakthrough, Deep Sky has raised funds from sources including the Bank of Montreal, National Bank of Canada, Whitecap Venture Partners, BrightSpark Ventures, the venture arm of Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, the Quebec government etc.

The startup has also formed partnerships with several direct-air capture companies like London-based Mission Zero Technologies to test their technologies.

Earlier this summer, Bill Gates had confabulated with some of the world’s wealthiest people, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.

They discussed their joint investments towards combating the effects of climate change. Such projects included technologies to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for a profit.

Such technology, which did not exist until a few years ago, is still unproven at scale. Yet, it has a uniquely alluring appeal.

According to a report in the New York Times, stripping away carbon dioxide that is heating up the world makes intuitive sense. And with a small but growing number of firms willing to pay for it, investors are jockeying to be first movers in what they believe will inevitably be a big industry that is necessary to help fight global warming.

Carbon dioxide removal is the most developed form of what is known as geoengineering, a broad set of speculative technologies designed to manipulate natural systems in order to cool the planet.

Companies working on ways to pull carbon dioxide from the air have raised over $5 billion since 2018.

Critics argue that carbon dioxide removal is a dangerous distraction that will perpetuate the behavior that is causing the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, the group assembled by Gates, known as Breakthrough Energy, is among the biggest backers of 800 carbon removal firms that have been started in recent years.

This year, Microsoft, Google, and British Airways were among the companies that committed a total of $1.6 billion to purchase removal credits.

That figure was up from less than $1 million in 2019, according to CDR.fyi, a website that tracks the carbon dioxide removal industry.

A group of companies including Stripe, H&M, JP Morgan and Meta have banded together to make over $1 billion in purchase commitments for carbon dioxide removal. Airbus, Equinor and Boeing have pledged to pay for the service, too.

Next year, industry executives believe firms could spend up to $10 billion on such purchases. In a recent report, McKinsey estimated the market could be worth as much as $1.2 trillion by 2050.

While huge sums of money are being dedicated to the nascent field, these projects will not have a effect on global temperatures anytime soon.

There are a few dozen facilities operational today, including ones in Iceland and California. But the biggest of these capture only a sliver of the greenhouse gases produced in a day.

Even if hundreds more such plants were built, they would not come close to counteracting even 1 per cent of annual carbon dioxide emissions.

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