What is a Skypark? Introducing CO₂-as-a-Service

We rarely think about where CO₂ comes from. However, it is present in various everyday items, such as the tomatoes grown in greenhouses, the bubbles in your soft drink, and the dry ice that helps keep food and medicine cold during transportation. For businesses that rely on it, CO₂ has traditionally been something that arrives predictably. 

The situation is changing. The traditional sources of CO₂ that have supported industries for decades are becoming less reliable. As CO₂ supply decreases, prices surge, and operations face interruptions. This creates a significant challenge for greenhouse growers, beverage producers and other industries that rely on CO₂, who suddenly find themselves without a crucial ingredient. 

Skypark offers a solution to this problem by providing a local, reliable, and sustainable source of CO₂ where it’s needed.  

Why is the CO₂ supply chain under pressure?

Greenhouse growers, food and beverage producers, dry ice suppliers, packaging companies: all of them need a steady supply of pure CO₂. Today, almost all of that CO₂ comes from fossil sources: a byproduct of ammonia plants, oil refineries, and other industrial processes that were never built to guarantee anyone's CO₂ supply.

That supply is getting harder to count on. Industrial emitters are increasingly capturing and storing their CO₂ underground rather than selling it. Transport costs keep rising, since CO₂ often travels long distances by road or sea. And geopolitical shocks push up gas prices and force fertilizer plants to cut production, tightening CO₂ supply even further.

The result is a market defined by price spikes and shortages, felt hardest in places with no domestic CO₂ production of their own: regions that depend entirely on imports arriving by sea. For these regional companies, CO₂ supply security is an operational risk.

How does a Skypark solve CO₂ supply problems?

Skytree's answer to this problem is Skypark: a regional Direct Air Capture (DAC) hub that produces fossil-free CO₂ locally, from ambient air, using renewable energy, right where the demand is.

Skypark replaces a fragile, fossil-based supply chain with local production. Instead of each customer sourcing CO₂ individually, a Skypark aggregates demand across a region and produces CO₂ centrally, close to the businesses that need it. 

The model is designed to be replicated. A Skypark can be built wherever three conditions come together: concentrated local CO₂ demand, available land, and access to cost-effective renewable energy.

The four main pillars of a Skypark

Each Skypark is set up as its own project company, a dedicated special purpose vehicle (SPV), built around four core partners:

• Site partners provide the land the Skypark is built on, and may take an equity stake in the SPV alongside Skytree.

• Energy partners supply the renewable electricity (or waste heat) that powers the DAC process. In some Skyparks, the site and energy partner are the same organization.

• Capital providers include local banks, development finance institutions, and equity investors fund construction and operations. They earn predictable, long-term returns backed by fixed-price offtake contracts.

• Offtakers are the greenhouse growers, food and beverage producers, dry ice suppliers, and other regional CO₂ users who buy CO₂ from the Skypark exactly as they do today, without ever owning or operating equipment themselves.

Depending on the market, a Skypark may also involve logistics providers to transport liquefied CO₂ to offtakers not directly connected to the hub, and government or regulatory bodies, whose permitting and policy support shape where and how fast a project can move.

How Skypark’s CO₂-as-a-Service works for customers

For the offtakers, buying CO₂ from a Skypark works the same way as buying it today. CO₂ is delivered by local pipeline or as liquid CO₂ by truck, on contract, at an agreed price. What changes is where it comes from, and how reliable that is.

Under a long-term, take-or-pay contract with inflation-indexed pricing, offtakers get three main benefits:

• No upfront capital expenditure: There is no DAC equipment to buy, host, or maintain. Customers are buying a supply contract, not hardware.

• Price stability: Contracted pricing protects offtakers from the price spikes and disruptions affecting the wider merchant CO₂ market.

• A fully renewable, fossil-free supply chain: The CO₂ is captured from ambient air and produced locally, which offtakers can reference directly in their own sustainability reporting.

In other words: the same CO₂ molecules, bought the same way, from a source that's local instead of imported, and stable instead of exposed to the next price shock, and circular instead of coming from fossil sources and leading to postponed emissions. 

Built to travel

The first Skypark, a 50/50 joint venture with Lingezegen Energy in the Netherlands, is set to launch in the coming months, supplying fossil-free CO₂ to a cluster of ten Dutch greenhouses. It's the first of a kind deployment for a model designed from day one to scale internationally, wherever the same conditions line up: Concentrated local CO₂ demand, access to cost-effective renewable energy, and a market ready for a more resilient alternative to what it has today.

That's the real story behind Skypark. 

It was never about one project. It's a playbook: long-term offtake, stable pricing, CO₂ produced locally instead of shipped in that can be built again and again.