The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced $131m for 33 research and development projects to advance the wide-scale deployment of carbon management technologies to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution, according to a news release yesterday.
The projects will address technical challenges of capturing CO2 from power plants and industrial facilities or directly from the atmosphere and assess potential CO2 storage sites, increasing the number of sites progressing toward commercial operations. Expanding commercial CO2 storage capacity and related carbon management industries will provide economic opportunities for communities and workers, helping to deliver on President Biden’s goal of equitably achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
DOE is investing $38m in 22 projects awarded under the “Carbon Management” funding opportunity that will develop technologies to capture CO2 from utility and industrial sources or directly from the atmosphere and transport it either for permanent geologic storage or for conversion into valuable products such as fuels and chemicals. Projects will examine commercial viability and technical gaps, while also examining environmental and community impacts of the technologies. Selected carbon dioxide removal projects will support the cost and performance goals of DOE’s Carbon Negative Shot initiative, which calls for innovation in pathways that will capture CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently store it at meaningful scales for less than $100/net metric ton of CO2-equivalent. CO2 storage projects announced today under this FOA will look specifically at assessing potential resources for mineral carbon storage—where the CO2 becomes permanently stored as a solid mineral through a chemical reaction. A detailed list of the selected carbon management projects can be found here.
DOE is investing $93m in 11 projects awarded under the “CarbonSAFE: Phase II – Storage Complex Feasibility” funding opportunity that will improve procedures to safely, efficiently, and affordably assess onshore and offshore CO2 project sites within a storage complex at a commercial scale. Projects were selected under DOE’s Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise (CarbonSAFE) initiative, which focuses on developing geologic storage sites with potential to cumulatively store 50 or more million metric tons of CO2. A detailed list of the selected CarbonSAFE projects announced today can be found here.
