The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Siemens Energy, Inc., and partners Constellation Energy, UC Berkeley and Battelle a $3.7 million grant to explore the feasibility of a multi-technology direct air capture (DAC).
According to the DOE announcement, made Aug. 11, the Teras DAC project is “aligned with the targets of the DOE’s Carbon Negative Shot initiative and is intended to create a credible path to enable the eventual construction of the proposed DAC hub.” The DAC hub setup would include a physical installation in the Midwest, while the analysis, design and digital twin simulations will be performed at UC Berkeley. Digital twins act as identical models of physical systems with real-time data input. The models can also provide insight into how the real-world system will perform over time.
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The direct air capture system will be anchored around Siemens Energy’s large-scale solid sorbent capture technology, with smaller deployments of next-generation capture technologies planned.
“This project seeks to accelerate the deployment of industrial-scale direct air capture technologies and to build the foundation for regional carbon networks to sequester and utilize CO2,” said Tarek Zohdi, principal investigator of the study and Berkeley Engineering’s associate dean for research.
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“With this partnership, the UC system will have the opportunity to contribute to the area of climate change mitigation on a massive scale,” he added. “We are excited to share our resources and expertise in modeling and simulation of complex systems, in order to advance this research.”
