It's very difficult to start a major business. We're just north of Vancouver, in Squamish. To do that, you need to get clear recognition of your technology and what you can do. We had a good idea—not me, but the founders of the company, my employers, had a good idea. Bringing that to light and convincing people that this was a way they could make a big difference in climate change required the technology to be demonstrated.
The real birth of Carbon Engineering was the pilot facility that we were able to make in Squamish, British Columbia. To do so, we attracted funding from two or three different government departments at the federal level, at the provincial level and from both sets of governments, Conservatives and Liberals, through time. We were able to build that facility.
Since then, we've raised $100 million. We've had many visitors come to our facility. Every single one of them wants to see the technology working. No matter how good an idea you have, if you can't demonstrate that it's working physically and show the results—in our case, through four years of operations—you can't make an impact. Now when I go out to do those meetings and talk to people, I'm backed by evidence. I'm not saying, “Here's a good idea” and showing a really jazzy PowerPoint slide; I'm showing real work. That real work was done through both private investment and investment from the government.
I will say that the investment was not easy to get. The gentleman was talking about the difficulty of economic impact assessment. It's a very valid point. It's very hard for us to predict how many jobs our company may create or have in 10 years' time. I know how many we'll have next year and the year after, but not in 10 years. How many indirect jobs? All of that's really hard.
What should be clear is if you're doing innovation in an area in the public interest—like climate change, for example, and many of the things Sue's talking about—those ideas merit support as long as they're thoroughly evaluated and as long as there's evidence that other people are backing them too.