2050’s Hottest Christmas Gift – Artisan Direct Air Capture Calcite Sculptures
We Did It!? Staff
But Roy stayed when Shexxon left. “I’ve been in Calgary my whole life, through the booms and busts. I got too old to follow the money.”
With help from a grant financed by the Just Transition Act of 2032, Roy was able to scrape together the money to buy an abandoned direct air capture mineralization demonstration facility five years ago. “I always wanted to indulge my creative side and now I had the time to do it.” He showed his first calcite sculptures in galleries in 2047.
Elaine Benes, owner of the Aurora Gallery where Archenova’s sculptures were first displayed, recalls being smitten immediately when she visited his workshop. “They are at once familiar and exotic,” she said. “From the most delicate animal figurines you can hold in your hand to the massive outdoor garden pieces, Roy’s sculptures somehow embody the whimsy everyone longs for today while still capturing the seriousness of the zeitgeist.”
The demand has been so high that Archenova now employs six technicians and artisans and opened his own gallery last year. “People seem to like my trinkets. And they seem chuffed that they’re made from the problem. I guess they’re conversation starters.”
Roy’s sculptures are available at his shop in the recently re-furbished 17th Avenue Retail and Entertainment District in Calgary or on Facenet at Roy’s Artisan DAC Sculptures.
Calgary – “Give the gift of being part of the solution” is the slogan splashed on Roy Archenova’s Facenet and it’s what he’s selling in his downtown Calgary store. Archenova, 63, is a sculptor working in calcite—but not just any calcite. The crystals he sculpts start as dull blocks of potential, conjured from his direct air capture CO2 mineralization facility on the outskirts of town. In his skillful hands these blocks are transmogrified into striking geometric prisms all hard angles and color, languid, curving waveforms, or even fanciful creatures escaped from the latest fantasy epic.
“The final shape is already in the block,” Roy said. “I just need to get rid of the excess calcite so everyone can see it.” Each sculpture comes with a certificate specifying how much CO2 is captured in it and they are showing up on Christmas wish lists across the country.
Archenova wasn’t always a sculptor. He spent most of his working life maintaining the massive direct air capture facility that Shexxon opened in 2031. “I was one of the process engineers working the rigs from day one. Everyone in the Sands was putting these in and it was a great time to be in Calgary—boom times again.”
Direct air capture technology development and deployment advanced at breakneck speed in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. The powerful industry group Pathways Alliance (now defunct) championed various carbon capture technologies as public opinion and international markets began turning against the high-emission bitumen. They pushed for ‘net zero oil’ as a way to maintain the viability of the Oil Sands. Canada’s 2050 Net Zero commitment, legislated back in 2021, paved the way for the billions in federal subsidies that made direct air capture a reality, albeit an expensive one.
It was a short-lived victory. A 2040 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report detailing requirements to recover from “overshoot” of the 1.5 degree temperature target undermined political support for these technologies. It detailed how using carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery and to keep high emissions oil in the market was delaying decarbonization significantly. Private capital fled first. The federal government, already under pressure from a public worried about accumulating climate impacts, distanced itself from the sector. It shut down federal subsidies programs for good in 2042.
“Like a lightswitch. That’s how fast the money folks pulled out and moved on to coastal operations and deep-sea mineralization. Our plant hung on for a while, but we closed shop in 2044 and shipped the useable tech to British Columbia.”