The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced $131 million for 33 research and development projects to advance the wide-scale deployment of carbon management technologies to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution. 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.
Carbon Management Awards
The carbon management funding comprises $38 million which will be allocated among 22 projects whose objective is to develop technologies which will capture CO2 and transport it either for permanent geologic storage or for conversion into products such as fuels and chemicals. Selected projects will also support 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. A detailed list of the selected carbon management projects can be found here.
CarbonSAFE Awards
Recipients will also be chosen for the CarbonSAFE: Phase II—Storage Complex Feasibility funding which awards $93 million among 11 projects that will improve procedures to assess onshore and offshore CO2 project sites safely, efficiently, and affordably within a storage complex at a commercial scale. A detailed list of the CarbonSAFE projects can be found here.
DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory will manage the selected projects.