Air Canada announced that it has invested $6.75 million in climate tech solutions company Carbon Engineering (CE), aimed at supporting the advancement of its technology that can capture carbon directly from the air at industrial scale.

Canada-based CE is focused on deploying its proprietary Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology. DAC technology, listed by the IEA as a key carbon removal option in the transition to a net-zero energy system, extracts CO2 directly from the atmosphere for use as a raw material or permanently removed when combined with storage. According to the landmark IPCC climate change mitigation study released earlier this year, scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C include carbon dioxide removal methods scaling to billions of tons of removal annually over the coming decades, with DAC positioned to potentially account for a significant portion of the total.

The captured CO2 can be permanently stored deep underground, or it can alternatively be used to produce ultra-low carbon transportation fuels, such as sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), by combining atmospheric CO2 with clean hydrogen using CE’s AIR TO FUELS technology.

The investment follows Air Canada’s announcement last year of an agreement to work with CE on advancing aviation decarbonization solutions, exploring opportunities including DAC, SAF, and carbon removal technologies.

Air Canada announced a series of sustainability goals last year, including a commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) throughout its global operations by 2050, along with interim targets to achieve 20% GHG net reductions from flights plus 30% GHG net reductions from ground operations by 2030, and a pledge to invest $50 million in SAF and carbon reductions and removals.

Michael Rousseau, President & Chief Executive Officer at Air Canada, said:

“Last year, we became the first Canadian airline to sign an MOU with CE to explore carbon capture scalability and other initiatives for our industry. We are proud to invest in CE to further advance new, transformational technologies towards carbon removal commercially.”