Page 70 - InvestAlberta-EDA-2025

PLANTING
THE SEEDS OF
THE FUTURE
Growing new solutions
BY LISA CATTERALL
Photos Supplied
MOST PEOPLE DON’T look at trees and think
about how hard they’re working. But trees are
nature’s carbon-capture experts. While humans work
on creating our own carbon-capture technologies,
trees have already been doing it for millennia.
In Alberta, there is growing private and public
investment in carbon-capture technologies — and
some companies are leveraging the natural ability of
trees to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
With the Government of Canada’s plan to reduce
emissions and reach net zero by 2050, reforestation is
an important part of reaching that goal as a scalable
and cost-effective way to remove carbon from the
atmosphere. About 30 per cent of global fossil fuel
carbon emissions are stored by forests.
Fort McMurray was identified as the perfect testing
ground for a new technology developed by Ontario-based
Flash Forest. The municipality, a five-hour drive northeast
of Edmonton, is heavily forested and has areas that can be
challenging for traditional tree planting and reforestation.
Flash Forest is a tree-planting company focused
on using technology like seed pods, drones, data and
machine learning to optimize reforestation efforts,
particularly in areas where reforestation might be
difficult. Between 2021-2023, the company completed
a pilot project in burn areas in northern Alberta, using
drones to reforest what would otherwise be difficult-
to-access regions.
Flash Forest received $1.8 million in grant
funding from Emission Reductions Alberta for the
Fort McMurray pilot project, due to the project’s
projected impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Grant
opportunities like this make Alberta a great place to
test new technologies and find innovative solutions,
drawing companies here.
Flash Forest’s approach requires only a fraction of the
manual labour and time used in traditional reforestation
efforts. Drone operators pilot aerial vehicles through burn
areas, firing seed pods into the ground at a high enough
velocity to embed them for germination.
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