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The company describes its pilot in Squamish as a “negative emissions facility” that can subtract CO2 emitted by cars, factories and other industrial sources.

“If we decide as a country that we want to build pipelines and we want to build LNG facilities and they are essential for our economy, but they have emissions, then maybe you offset that by building a negative emissions facility,” Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham said in an interview.

A commercial scale negative-emissions plant would scrub 1 megaton of CO2 from the atmosphere per year and occupy 30 acres of land. Oldham said the facility would be the equivalent of planting 40 million trees.

“It’s not sufficient to reduce emissions. We have to start removing the CO2 we’ve already put in the atmosphere,” Oldham said in an interview.

He would not say whether Chevron, Occidental or Canadian Natural planned to be among the first to deploy the CO2 sequestration technology, but said that oil and gas companies that use CO2 for enhanced oil recovery see the value in capturing and using CO2.

Enhanced oil recovery involves stimulating older oil and gas reservoirs with CO2 or water to pressurize the formations, stimulating the more production from existing wells. Occidental uses this method at many of its operations.

“Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture technology has the unique capability to capture and provide large volumes of atmospheric CO2. This capability complements Occidentals’ enhanced oil recovery business and provides further synergies by enabling large-scale CO2 utilization and sequestration,” Richard Jackson, Occidental’s senior vice-president of operations said in a release.