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September/October 2022 - ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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42 BCBUSINESS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 TOP: CARBON ENGINEERING LTD ing a heightened risk that a country that doubles down on last century's energy solution might be left holding an empty bag. The Wild West Perversely, the final risk when contemplat- ing whether zero is possible is overconfi- dence—or, at least, over-reliance on a "wild card" that will save us by 2050, no matter how unseriously we respond in the short term. One such solution might be the emerg- ing technology that makes it possible to capture CO2 directly from the air and either sequester it in the ground or use it to create a net-zero alternative fuel source. The Squa- mish-based company Carbon Engineering is one of the world's leading Direct Air Cap- ture ( DAC) developers, but as vice-president of business development Anna Stukas says, "It would be incredibly dangerous to think of negative emissions technology as a get- out-of-jail-free card." But then she points to the jailhouse door. First, Stukas says, "I take umbrage with the CCI characterization of DAC as a 'wild card.' It's an early-stage technology that we are working diligently to de-risk." CE has partnered with 1PointFive (a subsidiary of the old Occidental Petroleum) on its first full-scale DAC plant, which is designed to capture 1 Mt a year of CO2 for permanent sequestration underground. This is old hat for Oxy, which has more experience than anyone in the business of harvesting CO2 from industrial exhaust and pumping it into oily aquifers to enhance the recov- ery of fossil fuels. Now, Oxy is positioning itself to sequester for profit, a huge business opportunity if world governments get seri- ous about levying carbon taxes and offering offsets on the way to net-zero. Oxy's "base- line case"—a plan it announced in a March investor update—calls for the construction of 70 similar-sized DAC plants between now and 2035, with an "aspirational target" of 135 plants. Also in March, Oxy announced that European airplane giant Airbus had contracted to purchase carbon credits from the first plant at the rate of 100,000 tonnes a year for four years. So, notwithstanding the expense, the years of missed targets and broken prom- ises, and Canada's unrelenting announce- ments of fossil fuel expansion—and notwithstanding that, as CCI says, "engi- neered forms of negative emissions are… best viewed as a complement to other solu- tions rather than a substitute"—CICE and the Carbon Engineering solutions seem to offer a rare bright spot. On the road to net zero in 2050, Stukas says, "I am cautiously optimistic." n "It would be incredibly dangerous to think of negative emissions technology as a get-out-of- jail-free card." – Anna Stukas, vice president of development, Carbon Engineering CAPTURE IT Carbon Engineering's Innovation Centre in Squamish is developing technology that removes carbon dioxiode from the air

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