USA Has Raised CCS Development Grants to $777MM Since 2021

The USA Department of Energy (DOE) announced Monday over $23 million in funding for technology transfer and knowledge sharing to advance the deployment of carbon, capture and storage (CCS) solutions, raising total grants to nearly $800 million since 2021.

The funding, called the Regional Initiative to Accelerate Carbon Management Deployment, aims to help ensure the country maintains “secure, affordable, and environmentally sound fossil energy supplies”, according to the DOE. It was launched 2019 under the department’s Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Office (FECM).

“With the selections announced today, FECM has invested over $777 million in more than 100 projects since January 2021 that advance research, development, and deployment of carbon capture, transport, and storage approaches”, the DOE said in a press release.

“This progress is essential to help drive economic development, technological innovation, and high-wage jobs as we build a clean energy and industrial economy.”

In the latest rollout 16 projects across 14 states have been selected for a total of $23.4 million “to provide locally-tailored technical assistance and enhanced stakeholder engagement around carbon management technologies”.

The projects concern technical assistance, public engagement and geological research, and focus on communities affected by carbon management projects.

Carbon Solutions LLC has received $2.5 million to help with planning for Project WyoTCH, a CCS facility in Wyoming with a capacity of up to 25 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. The funding is specifically for the design of a roadmap that would “allow stakeholders to visualize and analyze hundreds to thousands of carbon management infrastructure scenarios, identifying key thresholds for policies, investments, and risk to determine how this information can be used to develop a robust business case”, the DOE said.

Another $2.5 million has gone to the University of North Dakota to help it “provide technical assistance and engagement to a prospective large-scale carbon management storage hub, with strong emphasis on public engagement activities, environmental justice analysis, and social science research that will support a better understanding of the social landscape of the region in which the hub would be developed”.

The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology has been allotted the second-biggest share with just less than $2.5 million to fasttrack the launch of a carbon management hub in the Four Corners region by getting the support of locals through engagement.

The Battelle Memorial Institute has also been earmarked around $2.5 million for the establishment of “a foundation for a carbon management hub along the Mid-Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf from northern Virginia to Massachusetts to help meet regional decarbonization goals set by states, communities and industry”.

The University of Texas has bagged nearly $2.49 million for the formation of “a stakeholder community that will provide accurate and reliable information about carbon management as an emissions mitigation option for the hundreds of industrial and power sector CO2 emissions sources”.

The Oklahoma State University has won close to $1.36 million for pre-construction and public engagement works for a project to build carbon management infrastructure in the Anadarko basin.

Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources has been allocated $1 million “to assess and provide pertinent data via the Alaska Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage Database to an emerging carbon management industry with the goal of accelerating the development and implementation of CO2 storage within the Cook Inlet Region of Alaska”.

Among geological work-related projects, Indiana University has also received $1 million as the biggest recipient in this area of concern. The funding is for a project “to identify favorable areas in Indiana that can support commercial-scale carbon management hubs to accelerate the adoption of the technology, focusing on multiple saline reservoirs of Cambrian and Ordovician age at ideal depths for sequestering carbon”.

The other recipients for projects related to geological research are the University of Oklahoma ($999,994), the University of Illinois ($999,985), the University of Wyoming ($998,968), Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources ($998,015), the Geological Survey of Alabama ($958,735), the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology ($906,965), the Utah Geological Survey ($892,683) and Western Michigan University ($862,117).

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