Scientific American reports on some scientific Canadians who have tackled the carbon-offset problem – there’s too much CO2 trapping heat in the atmosphere – in the most direct way possible, with Canada’s largest company, Shopify, funding a new technique called “direct air capture” (DAC) that sucks carbon dioxide right out of the sky:
Carbon Engineering promised Shopify it would store the e-commerce company’s carbon offsets—roughly equivalent to the emissions from 132 tanker trucks’ worth of gasoline—in a DAC facility it expects to bring online in 2024.
“Large-scale DAC-based carbon removal is essential to undo 200 years of burning fossil fuels,” said Stacy Kauk, the director of Shopify’s Sustainability Fund, in a press release. “We need others to join us with purchase commitments so we can kickstart the market, scale this technology globally, and start reversing climate change.”
Shopify, which is worth about $140 billion, is the first company to use Carbon Engineering’s new DAC service. The offsets company said yesterday that it is now accepting DAC carbon offset purchases from other customers, including ones as small as 100 metric tons.
“We’re on the brink of large-scale deployment of our technology and the next critical step is accumulating market interest and securing customers,” said Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham in a separate release. “This new service allows us to do that. It also makes it easy for companies and governments to include permanent carbon removal in their net-zero plans.”