Take: Clear Skies: Direct air capture and Canada's advantage

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Take on a podcast episode from Disruptors, originally published Wed, 21 Oc. Listen: https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/rbc-disruptors/

TL;DR

Deep Sky positions itself as a “project developer” for direct air capture (DAC), hosting multiple vendor technologies on one Alberta site to compress the learning curve. Useful framing.
CEO Alex Petre claims first DAC credits produced in North America as of June. Contestable — US sites have delivered earlier; depends on definition.
Final investment decision on a first commercial facility targeted late 2027; three sites in development (Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec); three large plants operational within five years.
The commercial thesis is export: Canada’s storage geology plus the DAC investment tax credit sell to storage-poor buyers like Japan and Switzerland via Paris Article 6.2.
No cost-per-tonne, capacity, or buyer figures disclosed. The episode is strategy and jurisdiction, not economics.

RBC’s Disruptors sends host John Stackhouse to Deep Sky’s test site in Innisfail, Alberta, for a conversation with CEO Alex Petre. The episode is a tour-plus-interview covering how DAC works, why Deep Sky runs competing capture units side by side, and why Petre thinks Canada — geology, gas-processing workforce, fiscal regime — is the jurisdiction to build in. It’s pitched at a general Canadian business audience, so the basics get airtime.

Disruptors on CaptainDrawdown (AI)

Take: Clear Skies: Direct air capture and Canada's advantage