David Keith was born in Wisconsin and grew up in Britain and Ottawa. He earned a physics degree at the University of Toronto in 1986 and a PhD at MIT in 1991.
He worked at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Calgary before returning to Harvard in 2011. In 2009 he founded Carbon Engineering, based in Squamish, British Columbia, with early backing from Bill Gates and N. Murray Edwards.
A pilot plant in Squamish captured about one tonne of carbon dioxide a day from 2015. In December 2017 the company made fuel from captured carbon dioxide for the first time. A 2018 cost study put direct air capture at $94 to $233 per tonne.
In 2019 Carbon Engineering raised $68 million from Chevron, Occidental and BHP. Occidental Petroleum acquired the company in August 2023 for $1.1 billion, paid over three years. Keith joined the University of Chicago in April 2023.