The United States Department of Energy (DOE) announced on Jan. 30 that it will invest $131 million in 33 research and development projects that support the wide-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies.
The projects will focus on the technical challenges of capturing carbon dioxide from power sites and industrial facilities or directly for air. They will also look into potential carbon storage sites and increase the number of locations that progress toward commercial operations.
“By deploying tools to capture, remove, and store CO2 emissions, we can dramatically reduce the air pollution harming our health and intensifying extreme weather events,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “The projects announced today will get us closer to achieving our climate goals while helping to revitalize local economies and deliver environmental benefits to communities too often left behind.”
Relevant: DOE $20M Funding To Ease Regional Development Of Carbon Capture Projects
DOE will target $38 million toward 22 projects under the “Carbon Management” funding opportunity. The projects will work on technologies to capture carbon from utility and industrial sectors or directly form air and transport it for permanent geological storage or conversion to products such as chemicals and fuels. The selected projects will look into commercial viability and technical issues while also examining the environmental and community impacts of carbon capture.
The projects will support the cost and performance targets of the Department of Energy’s Carbon Negative Shot initiative, which looks for innovation in carbon capture and storage at scale for under $100/net metric ton of CO2 equivalent.
The pathways will look specifically at mineral CO2 storage, where carbon is stored as a solid mineral using a chemical reaction.
DOE will invest $93 million in 11 projects selected under the “CarbonSAFE: Phase II – Storage Complex Feasibility” funding opportunity. These projects will focus on improving procedures to safely, efficiently, and affordably assess onshore and offshore CO2 project locations at a commercial scale. The projects were chosen under DOE’s Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise (CarbonSAFE) initiative, which prioritizes developing geologic storage locations with the potential to cumulatively store at least 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.
All selected projects will be managed by DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL).
Read more: U.S. Carbon Capture Gets $20 Million Boost From DOE
