True North, Strong and Carbon-Free: Canada’s Leadership in Carbon Removal

Carbon Removal Canada Executive Director Na'im Merchant hosted an exciting discussion at COP29 about carbon removal in Canada. It was a standing-room-only crowd at the CRIN pavilion for the session, which featured panelists Jason Vanderheyden, Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy at Deep Sky, Benoit Charette, Quebec Minister of the Environment and the Fight Against Climate Change, Rebecca Schulz, Alberta Minister of Environment and Protected Areas, and David Frank, Director of Policy Engagement at Microsoft.

Themes covered included the need for government and industry to work together to find solutions that can enable carbon removal to succeed, for the sector to find new and innovative ways to create more demand for carbon removal going forward, and the need for opportunities to develop IP across Canada that can potentially be exported around the world to make it a global industry that Canada leads on. The panelists also emphasized the importance of consultation with industry, Indigenous communities, and local residents on potential projects.

Schulz said Alberta has always said it is technology agnostic but that it wants to be the place where innovators choose to come to test these technologies and to grow and thrive.

"As a lot of folks are knocking on our doors saying, 'hey, we want to test other new technologies here,' we've been looking at our programs to say how do we incentivize that," she said.

"We are at the very, very beginning of the carbon removal sector," said Merchant. "I personally think it’s going to be one of the biggest undertakings of humanity to remove billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere – but we have to start somewhere. And I think that that approach of we’ll start small and we’ll build on this...and we’ll make targeted and strategic bets, I think is the right way forward."