A Company Funded by Bill Gates Wants to Capture BC’s Carbon

By Abigail Popple, The Tyee

A northern B.C. village may become the home of a new carbon-storage facility built by a Bill Gates-backed American startup.

If completed, Canada’s first “carbon-casting” site could start operating in Valemount as early as next January, according to Graphyte, the company behind the plan. Although there is some local skepticism, there is also hope that the plan could add jobs to the local economy while preventing the burning of waste wood.

Established in 2023 and funded, in part, by billionaire Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Graphyte says it can capture carbon from the forestry and agriculture industries by collecting unusable organic matter, dehydrating it and compressing it into bricks that do not decompose. Those bricks are wrapped in plastic and buried underground, where Graphyte says they will remain intact for thousands of years.

The company has sold bricks stored at its first site, near its Pine Bluff, Arkansas, headquarters, as carbon credits to companies such as Microsoft and investment banker J.P. Morgan to offset their emissions.

The company is now negotiating with the Valemount Community Forest to secure a deal to build its proposed carbon-casting site in the local industrial park, four kilometres south of the town centre.

Read more in The Tyee.