The Department of Energy has rolled out a multibillion-dollar series of carbon capture and storage awards. The announcement last week (May 17) follows almost immediately the Biden administration’s announced Environment Protection Agency program to remove or displace carbon dioxide emissions from electric power plants.
The EPA program relies heavily on technology to reduce CO2 emissions, including capturing, transporting, and storing carbon dioxide. The administration, repeating fossil energy industry claims, asserts that this is a readily available, proven technology. The claim has generated considerable skepticism, given that it is largely unsupported by the history of the technology.
The DOE program, funded by the administration’s Nov. 2021, $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, includes $251 million for 12 CCS programs in seven states, and the “re-opening of the $2.25 billion Carbon Storage Validation and Testing funding opportunity announcements.” This funding program, aka “CarbonSAFE,” is run by DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, with operations in Albany, Ore., near Portland; Morgantown, W.Va.; and Bruceton, Pa., south of Pittsburgh.
Nine state CCS programs include:
- Bluebonnet Sequestration Hub, LLC (Houston) for $16.5 million to complete site approvals for the Occidental Petroleum project along the Texas Gulf Coast, with potential for more than 350 million metric tons of total CO2 storage capacity.
- BP North America Inc. (Houston) $33.4 million for characterization and permitting of two commercial-scale storage sites along the Texas Gulf Coast to ultimately store up to 15 million metric tons of CO2 per year.
- Colorado School of Mines (Golden) $32.7 million for a regional CO2 storage hub to address emissions from cement, hydrogen, and power plants, including geologic characterization efforts at two sites in Colorado’s Pueblo region.
- Magnolia Sequestration Hub, LLC (Houston), $21.6 million to an Oxy subsidiary to complete the site approvals for the Magnolia Sequestration Hub in Allen Parish, Louisiana, with an estimated 300 million metric tons of total CO2 storage capacity.
- Southern States Energy Board (Peachtree Corners, Georgia) $18 million for site characterization and permitting for a storage hub near Bucks, Alabama, for CO2 sourced from a variety of industries including electric generation and steel manufacturing.
- Timberlands Sequestration, LLC (Houston), being developed by Blue Sky Infrastructure, founded by Cheniere Energy, $23.8 million to complete site characterization for a biomass carbon removal and storage project for the Alabama River Cellulose pulp and paper mill located in Monroe County, Alabama.
- University of Illinois (Champaign) $17.7 million for site characterization for the Cambrian Mt. Simon Sandstone/Eau Claire Formation storage complex, for CO2 storage from the Dallman 4 coal-fired plant owned by the city of Springfield, Illinois, about 2 million annual metric tons of CO2 storage capacity. DOE earlier selected this project as one of eight for negotiation in its $189 million Front-End Engineering Design study.
- University of North Dakota Energy & Environmental Research Center (Grand Forks) $38.1 million for site characterization and permitting efforts for a hub in central North Dakota, with CO2 from the Coal Creek lignite-powered generator and from local corn-based ethanol production, with about 200 million metric tons of total capacity.
- University of Wyoming (Laramie) $41 million for a commercial, multi-source, large-scale carbon capture and storage hub in Greater Green River Basin, Wyoming, with CO2 sourced from trona mining and direct air capture.
DOE is also awarding $3 million each to Carbon Solutions LLC (Okemos, Michigan), Howard Midstream Energy Partners LLC (San Antonio, Texas), Southern States Energy Board to perform detailed engineering design studies for regional CO2 pipeline networks.
“CarbonSAFE,” which DOE describes as its “flagship effort to move carbon storage technologies into geographically widespread commercial practice,” will see an expanded direction. According to DOE, the aim is “new and expanded large-scale, commercial carbon storage projects with capacities to store 50 or more million metric tons of CO2, along with associated CO2 transport infrastructure.” The agency will “accept applications under a broader scope, including storage complex feasibility in addition to the site characterization, permitting, and construction stages of project development. It also expands the definition of large-scale storage to allow for additional storage options.”
According to a statement attributed to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, “DOE is building out the infrastructure needed to slash harmful carbon pollution from industry and the power sector, revitalize local economies, and unlock enormous public health benefits.”
–Kennedy Maize
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