David Keith was born in Wisconsin because his father, a British-born field biologist, happened to be in graduate school there. The family moved on. Keith grew up in Britain and then Ottawa, where his mother taught history at Carleton University.
It was a household of birdwatching and fieldwork. He would go birdwatching with his father as a child. In his teens he spent summers in a National Research Council laser lab, and he spent part of a gap year in Nunavut as a research assistant to a wildlife biologist on Devon Island, a trip he says fixed his love of the Arctic. He has also canoed the Yellowknife River and skied across rough sea ice from Iglulik to Arctic Bay.
What almost nobody in climate circles expected was how much of the money would come from oil.
The odd thing is how those two worlds met. Keith studied physics at the University of Toronto, finishing in 1986, then took a doctorate at MIT in 1991, where he helped build the first working atom interferometer. The wilderness had taught him what a changing climate might cost. Physics taught him what could be measured.
He turned to climate and energy, and some of his proposals were loud. A 2004 paper based on his modelling suggested huge wind farms might have unexpected climate effects. His interest in spraying sulphuric acid into the upper atmosphere drew sharp criticism, and a planned 2021 balloon experiment in Sweden was cancelled after opposition from Sámi reindeer herders.
Carbon Engineering was the quieter path. Founded in 2009 out of research at the University of Calgary and Carnegie Mellon, it set out to pull CO2 from the air using a liquid that binds to the gas and a second cycle that releases it in concentrated form. Bill Gates, who had funded Keith's research since 2007, and Alberta oil financier N. Murray Edwards were early investors.
What almost nobody in climate circles expected was how much of the money would come from oil. A pilot plant in Squamish captured about one tonne of CO2 a day from 2015. In 2017 the team made fuel from the captured gas. A 2018 study put costs between US$94 and US$233 per tonne. In 2019 Chevron, Occidental and BHP backed a US$68 million round.
Occidental bought the company in August 2023 for US$1.1 billion, paid over three years, and said it would build 100 plants. Keith held about four percent before the sale.
The lesson for a founder is a plain one. The same man who walked ice floes and sat in the lab could not choose between pure science and practical engineering, so he built a company that needed both, and he accepted partners who did not always look like climate allies.