Deep Sky has received an AAA-A Pre-Issuance Rating from Sylvera for its upcoming Deep Sky One direct air capture (DAC) project—its second facility and one of the largest DAC projects in development globally.
This milestone also marks Sylvera’s first-ever Pre-Issuance Rating issued for a DAC project, made possible by its rating framework tailor-designed to the unique risks and requirements of DAC.
For a large-scale DAC project like Deep Sky One, where significant investment and offtake decisions can be made years before a facility begins issuing credits, the AAA-A Pre-Issuance Rating provides an important early signal of project quality and delivery risk.
Building on experience from its inagural large-scale DAC facility called Deep Sky Alpha, the Canada-based company now presented an opportunity for applying Sylvera’s DAC-specific framework at a substantial scale through its Deep Sky One project.
Commenting on this collaboration, Hugo Lakin, CDR Lead at Sylvera, shared, “DAC is one of the most important tools we have for addressing legacy emissions, but the market needs a shared standard for what a credible DAC project looks like. Our work with Deep Sky gives the market a real reference point.”
What does the AAA-A rating mean?
Through the Pre-Issuance Rating, Sylvera evaluates a project’s carbon accounting, additionality, and permanence, which are the core pillars of its Integrity Module, along with a Delivery Risk assessment of the project’s ability to deliver the credits it forecasts.
Deep Sky One’s AAA-A score indicates that the project comes with a low integrity risk overall, with very low additionality risk given DAC’s dependence on carbon credit revenue and strong performance across carbon accounting and permanence criteria.
Relevant: Deep Sky On Its Way To Build One Of The World’s Largest CDR Facilities In Manitoba, Canada
Sylvera’s DAC-centered framework is being launched amid a selectiveness surge in buyers and a demand consolidation around fewer, larger commitments. In this reality, its ratings offer a third-party integrity signal, which has an increasingly important role in how carbon removal projects secure financing and offtake agreements.
“The DAC market is still nascent, and buyers need to know that projects can actually deliver with integrity. Pre-issuance Ratings provide buyers with a clear view of how a DAC developer is accounting for the risks involved in FOAK projects,” Lakin added.
