Squamish-based Carbon Engineering named North American Company of the Year by Cleantech Group

Credit: Courtesy of Carbon Engineering

Carbon Engineering is teaming up with a subsidiary of oil giant Occidental Petroleum Corp. to build a Texas plant that will be the world’s largest direct air capture facility

The accolades keep coming for the air capture pioneer

Another day, another award for Carbon Engineering—that’s how it seems, anyway. After being recognized both locally and internationally in 2020, the Squamish-headquartered business has gotten off to a hot start this year.

Today, the firm received the 2021 North American Company of the Year Award from San Francisco-based Cleantech Group for its proprietary carbon dioxide capture technology, which releases the greenhouse gas from the air. The prize goes to the highest-ranked company on the annual Global Cleantech 100 list, which is in its 12th edition.

“Despite the tremendous challenges the global community faced in 2020, we are buoyed by the momentum we are seeing in the effort to act on climate change,” said Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham in a release, pointing out that the company’s success in 2020 included securing its first corporate customers in Shopify and Virgin Red.

“Receiving this award is a significant acknowledgement of this progress,” Oldham added. “It also highlights the growing recognition of the need for carbon removal tools like ours in the global race to reach net zero emissions.”

Previous Global Cleantech 100 North American Company of the Year Award winners include Impossible Foods, Nest (since purchased by Google) and Halifax-based cleantech outfit CarbonCure.

“This year’s Global Cleantech 100 list was striking for how many carbon-related companies there were in it, a far cry from even three, four years ago,” said Cleantech Group CEO Richard Youngman.

“I hope we will look back at 2020 as the year in which the foundation stones for direct air capture enabling major new industrial markets in carbon management were laid, in large part through Carbon Engineering’s licensing deals with deep-pocketed development companies in both the U.S. and in the U.K.”