A Quebec entrepreneur has a grand idea to reverse climate change by turning Canada into an international leader in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Frederic Lalonde is also the founder and CEO of the travel booking app Hopper. He recently set out to offset the emissions from helping people fly all over the world, so he started looking at the carbon problem.
“It’s one of those rare problems in my life where I was like, ‘Wow, like this is a lot worse than I thought,'” he said in an interview.
On Monday Lalonde stood in front of a business audience at a Canadian Club gathering in Montreal, painting a bleak picture of the climate crisis.
“Why would you bother taking CO2 out of the atmosphere? The reason is at the current concentrations, so 424 parts per million, we think the planet’s not stable,” he said. “We’re entering into a period where we’re going to see accelerating storms. We’re going to see a whole bunch of different issues.”
With that concern on his mind, he founded Deep Sky, a new company that plans to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on a massive scale.
“If you look at the energy and the storage potential of Canada, mathematically we could reverse climate change,” Lalonde claims. “I’ve been saying for a while that Canada is most likely the Saudi Arabia of carbon removal.”
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The idea of having companies pay someone to remove carbon from the air to offset their emissions is not new, but Lalonde wants to do it on an unprecedented scale.
“We could certainly be the place where this nascent industry reaches gigaton first, and that’s going to be the largest commodity industry in the world, which logically would make us one of the or the richest country in the world,” Lalonde said.
He wants to build futuristic-looking plants that would be capable of removing billions of tons of carbon both from the air and the ocean. In his view, Canada’s vast lands are the perfect place to store it.
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“You can either put it into pockets of very salty water four kilometres underground called a saline aquifer, or you can run it through volcanic rock. In both cases what happens is over some period of time it gets re-mineralized and it becomes CO3, which is basically chalk,” Lalonde said.
Pembina Institute senior advisor Scott MacDougall agrees that Canada has huge potential in the space.
“I think Canada can be, as he puts it, the Saudi Arabia of carbon,” MacDougall told Global News. “We’ve got hundreds of gigatons of storage potential in a number of provinces and thousands of gigatons of storage potential in a province like British Columbia.“
He said given the country’s geology, Canada could indeed become rich on the back of the carbon removal and storage industry, as Lalonde postulates.
Sara Hastings-Simon, associate professor in the department of earth, energy and environment at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, says capturing carbon from the air will be a key tool in the fight against climate change.
“I think it’s clear that we’re going to need some level of direct air capture if we’re going to really avoid the worst impacts of climate change as part of a more holistic approach to getting to net zero,” she said.
The Quebec government has invested $5 million in Deep Sky. Lalonde thinks the province’s hydroelectricity would be a perfect way to power the energy-intensive process. Quebec, however, has been expressing concern about a looming energy shortage as early as 2027.
“The first thing is we have a decade to kick-start the industry because as I speak today, we have surpluses,” Lalonde said.
He said carbon removal could also be done exclusively at night when energy usage is low.
“It’s a very energy-intensive technology. It takes a lot of energy to do so, and it comes at a significant cost,” Hastings-Simon said. “It’s sort of it’s important to understand that it’s not a substitution for a lot of other types of emission reduction that can be done and often can be done more cheaply.”
The technology to suck carbon out of the air at the scale Lalonde is talking about doesn’t exist yet and could be decades away. He wants to speed things up, starting by building a smaller-scale plant in Quebec by 2026. His goal is for that one to be able to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon, which would be a first springboard to his goals in the billions of tons.
“We’ve already bought the reactors that are being assembled by hand as we speak, and we’re picking out the sites,” he said.
Lalonde says he’s on the cusp of securing up to $100 million in new investments.
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