By Peter Henderson

Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy is giving a $40 million grant to a startup aiming to create a Canadian testing ground for technologies that suck carbon directly from the air, in an effort to speed up their rollout, the firms said on Wednesday.

U.N. scientists say the world needs to remove billions of metric tons of previously emitted CO2 from the atmosphere each year, in addition to slowing current emissions, and firms around the world are trying to find ways to respond.

Direct Air Capture, or DAC, is seen as a way to suck up vast amounts of carbon dioxide since it works with ambient air, but the technology has so far been energy-intensive, expensive and slow to reach the necessary scale.

To help accelerate development efforts, startup Deep Sky said it is creating the “Alpha” DAC test ground in Alberta, which will initially have room for eight companies to try out their technologies and tune them up on the way to developing commercial-scale plants.

The first will start removing carbon next spring, it said.

Deep Sky also will help test how DAC works in the cold climate of Canada, which is a major oil producer and last week raised its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by up to 50% by 2035.

Breakthrough Energy, founded by Bill Gates, invests and funds climate-focused startups. Its Catalyst unit focuses on early-stage firms and made the Deep Sky grant.

“The overall mission of Catalyst is to drive down the green premium and move these technologies towards profitability,” Breakthrough Energy Catalyst head Mario Fernandez said in an interview, adding that DAC was currently “very challenging”.

Deep Sky CEO Damien Steel said the company was starting to develop commercial scale direct air capture plants in Canada and aimed to use the Alpha test ground to find efficient new technology to use. The development has started before Deep Sky has picked the technology for the project, which increases speed but also carries risks.

Steel said that Deep Sky was running multiple development steps in parallel that normally would be done sequentially.

“The reason they’re done in a sequential order is because nobody ever wants to take on any risk,” he said. “We don’t have the time.”

The first seven of the eight DAC companies are Airhive, Mission Zero, Skyrenu, Skytree, NEG8 Carbon, Greenlyte and Phlair.

(Reporting by Peter Henderson; Editing by Michael Perry)