Montreal-based Deep Sky has begun geological studies of the Bécancour and Thetford Mines subsoils to store CO2The company that wants to remove carbon from the atmosphere will also announce Wednesday the construction of facilities in Alberta to test technologies that will store up to 3,000 tonnes of CO.2 per year, starting next year.
“We are currently making a map of the underground” of Bécancour and Thetford Mines, says Deep Sky president and co-founder Frédéric Lalonde in a telephone interview. The exercise will characterize the subsoil of these two sites where the company plans to store CO2 to obtain “the equivalent of an underground Google Map.”
Located in Bécancour, the first site covers an area of nearly 50 km2mainly located in industrial and agricultural areas. “We have obtained the authorizations [des propriétaires]one field at a time” to conduct the study, says Mr. Lalonde, also a big boss and co-founder of the popular travel app Hopper.
More than 15,000 acoustic detectors have been installed in the four corners of this area in order to collect the data necessary to characterize the ground using vibrations emitted up to four kilometers deep.
If the site proves suitable for storage, the company plans to build facilities there to capture and store carbon. “When you look at Quebec, where there is the highest concentration of GHG emissions, it’s in Bécancour,” says Mr. Lalonde.
“We will have the possibility of capturing several million tonnes at the source. This would make Bécancour not only the transition valley, but potentially the only carbon-negative industrial park,” he says optimistically.
Deep Sky has begun further pre-feasibility studies near the municipality of Thetford to characterize the soil and determine whether it is possible to “mineralize CO” there.2 “.
Mineralization in situ is a storage process that differs from that of the injection planned at Bécancour. It consists of sending CO2 dissolved in water in underground volcanic rocks. Reactive to carbon, these convert CO2 into a kind of calcite, preventing it from rising to the surface and returning to the atmosphere.
Less proven, the mineralization process would offer a significant advantage to Quebec to deploy large-scale capture in the province, according to Mr. Lalonde: “In Quebec, we have volcanic rock. The entire Far North is made of volcanic rock.”
The startup will also announce on Wednesday that it has selected a site in Innisfail, Alberta, to build what it is billing as “the world’s first center dedicated to the innovation and commercialization of carbon removal solutions.”
The facility, dubbed Deep Sky Labs, is expected to be operational this winter and will have the capacity to capture 3,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Eight direct CO capture technologies2 in the air (DAC) will be deployed there to collect operational data. These will be powered by renewable energy.
The eight DAC suppliers are Airhive, Avnos, Greenlyte Carbon Technologies, Mission Zero, NEG8 Carbon, Phlair (ex-Carbon Atlantis), Skyrenu and Skytree. Two more technologies are expected to be added eventually.