Montreal firm Deep Sky’s dream of finding CO2 into the atmosphere and storing it somewhere where it will stop causing global warming is taking shape.
Deep Sky announces the launch of construction work on a laboratory for experimenting with different technologies in Innisfail, Alberta, and in-depth geological analyses to assess storage capacities in the Bécancour, Mauricie and Thetford Mines regions in Chaudière-Appalaches.
Bécancour: “a gift from the gods”
In interview with The Canadian PressDeep Sky’s president and co-founder, Frédéric Lalonde, explains that the combination of a suitable subsoil and the presence of an industrial park in Bécancour would make it possible to capture CO2 at the point of emission to store it: “The fact that our geology in Quebec is favorable under Bécancour is a bit of a gift from the gods of geology. It allows us to do a hybrid project. Which means that in the long term, the Bécancour industrial park could be carbon negative,” he says.
Possible storage in this region would be about 4 kilometers underground, in the saline aquifer. “One of the ways known since the 1970s to store CO2 permanently, it is to inject it into these aquifers.”
To do this, it is first necessary to map a subsoil under an area of nearly 46 square kilometres. “It is the largest 3D mapping project ever done east of Manitoba,” a project that is progressing for the moment with apparent social acceptability, maintains the entrepreneur.
Profiting from asbestos in Thetford Mines
In Thetford Mines, geological mapping relies on other parameters in what is known as the Dunnage Formation. “This is where the Appalachian zone meets the St. Lawrence Valley. By happy coincidence, the rock that usually surrounds the asbestos fibre is extremely conducive to the mineralization of CO2. It’s a completely different process where certain volcanic rocks that have a high magnesium content react with CO2 and turn it into chalk,” explains Mr. Lalonde.
These are, however, only very preliminary steps in geological mapping.
Delay in Quebec
For the moment, it is impossible to go beyond exploratory steps in Quebec, on the one hand because the understanding of the subsoil in Quebec is embryonic and, on the other hand, because Quebec is dragging its feet and still does not have a legislative framework for burying CO2unlike Alberta and other provinces: “We cannot remain in a legal vacuum, it makes no sense,” protests Frédéric Lalonde.
The problem is that, in the absence of a legislative framework, projects in Quebec do not have access to the significant federal tax credits for carbon capture, available in certain provinces, including Alberta, which will host the experimental laboratory, even though Deep Sky has received $25 million in support from the Quebec government.
Lucky breaks
The choice of Innisfail was obvious, says the entrepreneur, who found there the kind of storage well the company needed: “They had a project already in place, already approved, already done. We called the owners and asked them if we could inject CO2 “Luckily, they were looking for a customer. Deep Sky bought the well and, by a happy juxtaposition of circumstances, also found a solar farm on site that had no customers. “We bought all the capacity!” he says.
The facility, Deep Sky Labs, is set to receive its first machines to begin testing in September. But these are very modest beginnings. The company has ordered about ten machines from different suppliers around the world, all of which will be tested on a small scale.
A modest beginning
“The machines in question will remove a few hundred tons, while we need to remove billions of tons. So that’s not how we’re going to change the fate of the world, but we’ve never used these technologies. We don’t even know how much energy the machines will take, we don’t know if they’re stable.”
“This is the first time they have been manufactured. The goal is to determine which technologies are promising as quickly as possible, then move towards larger-scale concepts and eventually build factories to manufacture these capture units,” says Frédéric Lalonde.
Of course, this is an adventure based on hope, but without guarantees. Some suppliers have already backed out, their prototypes not delivering the promised goods. For the others, “we hope that the machines will work when we connect them,” Mr. Lalonde admits bluntly.
Evolution curve
But he rejects critics who argue that CO capture and sequestration2 “It doesn’t work. It’s wrong!” he exclaims. “Yes, it’s extremely inefficient, but we’re only at the beginning,” he argues, recalling that all new technologies go through an evolution curve.
“Here we are in scales, there have been two changes in the scales. There have been a few thousand tons; the next generation of factories that are coming online are in the 80,000 to 100,000 tons per year. We have just made a jump from 1,000 to 100,000. We are far from a million, we are far from a billion. But if we make jumps of 10 to 100 times each time, we will get there.”
“A moral duty to try”
And he insists that we can no longer wait: “Have you seen what’s happening in Florida? What’s happening and has happened in the West? We’re losing our national parks, we’re losing our forests. In our coastal areas, soon everything will be flooded. What I think is essential is that we accelerate this technological development as if our lives depended on it, because they do.”
And he adds a killer argument: “When we want to capture CO2there is a geological constraint. Canada and Quebec in particular happen to be the Saudi Arabia of CO2 withdrawal2. Whether we like it or not, we have the geology. We have the renewable energy potential that does not exist in the United States. So inevitably, if this industry develops, it will develop in Canada.
“From the moment that, in Canada and Quebec, we have the natural resources to do it, we have, in my opinion, a moral duty to try,” he concludes.