Swiss Carbon Capture Company Climeworks Chooses Calgary As Its Canadian Home Base

Testing facility will launch this fall before company builds large-scale plant

A Swiss carbon capture company is setting up shop in Calgary, as it establishes its Canadian headquarters in the city.

A Climeworks employee works on one of the carbon dioxide collectors at Mammoth, the Swiss company's largest facility in Iceland. (Climeworks)

Climeworks was the first in the world to launch a commercial direct carbon capture plant. The technology essentially sucks carbon dioxide from the air and separates the carbon to be stored underground.

For now, a small team is operating out of a shared space hosted by the Energy Transition Centre foundation in downtown Calgary.

Come the fall, Climeworks will operate a mobile testing facility to see how the technology fares in Alberta’s frigid winter temperatures. The facility is currently being tested in Saudi Arabia, before it is shipped to Alberta in the summer.

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After that, the focus will be on building a large-scale plant, which the company’s co-founder Christoph Gebald, Co-founder of Climeworks, says could be the company’s biggest. The timeline and exact location is still to be determined, but the company says it will be somewhere in Alberta.

The company currently operates two direct air capture plants in Iceland. The larger of the two, called Mammoth, aims to remove 36,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air annually. That’s about the amount of CO2 emitted by some 8,400 vehicles in a year.

The company also recently partnered with Coca-Cola, using carbon captured from the air to carbonate sparkling water.

Christoph Gebald co-founded Climeworks in 2009. A small team is currently working at the company's new Canadian headquarters in a shared office space in Calgary.

Christoph Gebald co-founded Climeworks in 2009. A small team is currently working at the company's new Canadian headquarters in a shared office space in Calgary. (Tiphanie Roquette/Radio-Canada)

Alberta A ‘Global Leader’

Catie O’Neal, Carbon Removal Canada, with the non-profit Carbon Removal Canada says the country, and Alberta in particular, has “the right puzzle pieces to meet the moment.”

That includes expertise from the energy sector, a regulatory framework, an abundance of the geological formations needed to store the carbon underground, and — perhaps most importantly — tax credits from the provincial and federal governments.

Alberta is also becoming a more attractive market for these projects as the United States pulls back its support for direct carbon capture, said Jorden Dye, Director of the Pembina Institute's Carbon Dioxide Removal Centre.

Dye said Alberta “is emerging as a global leader in carbon dioxide removal.”

Last year, Montreal-based Deep Sky began its carbon capture operations at its facility in Innisfail, Alta.

Climeworks employs about 400 people worldwide and will be making more local hires in the Calgary area.

Last year, the company laid off about 10 per cent of its workforce, which Gebald says was a natural righting of the ship after years of heavy growth.