The Deep Sky Alpha facility in Alberta, Canada, has launched into operation a direct air capture (DAC) system developed by Europe’s largest aerospace company, Airbus.
Following a notably rapid, eight-month-long period of engineering and construction, the DAC system has come online at the Deep Sky Alpha location, where it will remove 250 tons of CO2 annually.
To remove atmospheric CO2 emissions, the system will use a technology that debuted on the market back in 2023 as a spinoff from the Airbus (Defence and Space) life-support systems used on the International Space Station.
The system captures carbon dioxide via a solid amine-based filter that then gets heated to release highly concentrated CO2, returning carbon-lean air back into the atmosphere.
Besides this temperature swing process, the DAC technology also comes with a unique energy system designed to recover the input energy and optimize energy consumption.
With this launch, Airbus joins a group of other companies that have partnered with Deep Sky on DAC deployments at the Alpha site, including Phlair, MissionZero, Skyrenu, Skytree, Carbon Capture Inc., and GE Vernova.
In a statement, Deep Sky CEO Alex Petre said that the company is incredibly pleased to be hosting Airbus technology in Canada and is looking forward to a continued partnership in the future.
She added, “In order for carbon dioxide removal to have an impact, we need to develop technologies that can rapidly scale to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.”
In August 2025, the Deep Sky Alpha facility was officially launched in Innisfail, Alberta, to serve as a first-of-its-kind carbon removal innovation and commercialization center.
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The location is envisioned to host up to 10 different DAC technologies at the same time, observing their performance under the same conditions and working on optimizations that could help reduce the notoriously high costs of this scalable carbon removal pathway.
To date, Deep Sky Alpha has received a US$40 million grant from the Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Catalyst financing tool and has also secured support from the Albertan government, who invested $3.6 million in this innovative project.
Deep Sky Alpha’s DAC operations are also expected to generate high-quality carbon removal credits, with the Royal Bank of Canada and Microsoft emerging as its first buyers, who have committed to purchase 10,000 tonnes of CO2 removal over a 10-year period.
Read more: Govt Of Alberta Supports Deep Sky Alpha With A $3.6M Investment
