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The energy industry gets a bad rap when it comes to innovation, yet the oilpatch is by far the largest spender on clean tech in Canada, to the tune of $1.4 billion a year. As part of its continuing coverage of the innovation economy, the Financial Post reports on the intersection of technology and energy, from the oilpatch in Alberta, off the shores of Nova Scotia to the plains of Saskatchewan.

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David Keith was a professor at the University of Calgary when he started putting some serious effort into devising a way to capture carbon dioxide from the air to combat climate change.

“I had some time on my hands, so I thought why not?” he said.

That was 2009 and he formed Carbon Engineering Ltd. with one of his students to push back against the prevailing wisdom that though carbon dioxide — which has risen to dramatically high concentrations in the atmosphere during the past few decades — could probably be removed from the air, it would be way too expensive to do so at any kind of meaningful scale.