Thank you.
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, whatever it may be.
Let me start by apologizing for the fact that I'm not physically present with you today, but I think I have a very good reason.
Yesterday I met with His Royal Highness Prince Charles. We were asked to come over and brief him on the technology that we've developed.
That was one of several meetings. I've also been in 10 Downing Street, talking to the Prime Minister's personal advisers. I've seen every major British government department in the last three days.
This comes on the back of work in 2019, when we did the same thing in the United States, seeing several of the candidates for the U.S. presidency through the Senate and through Congress, and seeing multiple senators and departments dealing with addressing climate change.
Here in Canada, we're doing the same thing. Why is that? How can a small Canadian company with less than 50 people at the time possibly get in at that level to see those types of people? The answer is that Canada has developed a technology through what we do at Carbon Engineering that can make a material and significant impact on the fight against climate change.
We are one of only three companies in the world that has developed a technology to pull CO2 directly out of the atmosphere.
You hear so much about emissions control. How do you stop CO2 from going up? It's very hard. It gets a lot easier if you can pull CO2 molecules down at the same time. The technology that we've developed here in Canada allows you to uniquely do that on a large scale.
When you can eliminate any CO2 emission from any point on earth, of any type and at any moment in time, you now have a way to address climate change, and you have a way to get to net zero without causing massive disruption by banning flying and all the other various measures that will have a material impact on our way of life.
Again, how can a small Canadian company get to the point where it can develop that type of technology? It's thanks to the support of a lot of Canadian government institutions, and thanks to some pretty detailed review of our technology, our business plan and our value proposition.
Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere is very hard. It's 400 parts per million. It's like pulling a single drop of ink out a swimming pool. It's the same technological challenge. It's taken us 10 years to get there. We started that technology before anybody talked about the need for negative emissions, before the IPCC wrote their reports saying that unless we start pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, we're going to have a huge climate change problem.
Who do you go to when you're developing that type of technology, when you are ahead of the trend and you are pre-revenue?
We went to various government departments, and over the last 10 years, we've received $14 million in funding from Canadian government departments. Now we've more than matched that. We've raised over a $113 million in private funding, the vast majority coming from outside the country and now being spent in Squamish, in Vancouver, in our other sites, and at our research partners across the country.
This was not a trivial exercise. We lost many grants too. We competed for work with SDTC, with NSERC, with IRAP, with NRCan, and we lost plenty of times too.
Crucially, we won a few. Those pieces of work that we won in those early days, backed by the other funding that we got, allowed us as a company to develop the technology that today, in my meeting with Prince Charles, he identified as potentially a world-saving technology. I don't see this as a subsidy. I see this as strategic support for early-stage companies that have great ideas.
When getting external money is the hardest thing to do, government support is critical. We've benefited from that every step along the way; we're grateful for that, and we think the Canadian taxpayers will benefit from that, way beyond any investment that the Canadian government has made.
We think one of the critical elements of any government is to support the development of critical ideas and to assist companies in their early days, but only when there's evidence that those ideas make sense, when they're in the public good, and when other people are willing to put their money in as well to back them.
In summary, I think the structure of R and D support in Canada is strong. If it wasn't for that, we would not be here as a company with a world-leading technology with a potentially massive impact on the number one issue facing the planet today.
I would urge the committee to think long and hard about the success stories that have occurred in Canadian technology development, and in other fields as well, thanks to the support of Canadian government departments.
Thank you.