October 10, 2024 - The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) has announced $29 million for 12 research and development projects to fund two carbon management priorities—the conversion of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into environmentally responsible and economically valuable products and the development of lower-cost, highly efficient technologies to capture CO₂ from industrial sources and power plants for permanent storage or conversion. Accelerating the development of these technologies will advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s ambitious climate goals of achieving a carbon-neutral power sector by 2035 and net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and help establish the foundation for a successful carbon capture, storage, and conversion industry in the United States.

“The deployment of carbon capture and storage creates an opportunity to reduce emissions of additional pollutants beyond carbon dioxide, as well as to convert captured carbon emissions into environmentally beneficial products,” said Brad Crabtree, Assistant Secretary of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. “The projects announced today leverage university and industry expertise to  help advance the commercialization of transformational carbon capture and conversion technologies that have the potential to deliver cleaner and more sustainable energy and products.”

Seven projects selected under this funding opportunity will focus on technologies that utilize CO₂ from sources such as industrial and power generation facilities, as well as from legacy CO₂ emissions captured directly from the atmosphere. Each of these projects will produce value-added products while simultaneously reducing CO₂ emissions:

• Air Protein (San Leandro, California) will develop a low-carbon footprint protein ingredient to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture industry.
• Kiverdi (Pleasanton, California) will advance technology to transform waste carbon from a variety of abundant, low-cost CO₂ feedstocks into industrially important fatty acids.
• LanzaTech Inc. (Skokie, Illinois) will advance a new process to convert industrial waste CO₂ into isopropanol, a precursor to the propylene value chain of chemicals.
• Auburn University (Auburn, Alabama) will develop a process to convert CO₂ to polyethylene plastic using flue gas from the pulp and paper industry.
• Quasar Energy Group LLC (Independence, Ohio) will develop a technology to produce a type of polyurethane plastic from algae that are grown on an industrial waste stream of CO₂.
• TDA Research Inc. (Golden, Colorado) will develop an efficient process to produce graphitic carbon compounds from CO₂ captured from industrial/power sources or directly from ambient air.
• Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, Missouri) will develop a low-carbon process to convert CO₂ to high-quality carbon nanotubes, which will be tested for use as anodes for lithium-ion batteries.

Five projects will focus on development and testing of enabling technologies such as engineering and advanced process control approaches to address non-greenhouse gas emissions in the context of carbon capture. Specifically, these projects will seek to develop technologies that enable scale-up testing and demonstrations of carbon capture systems and assure their responsible deployment:

• American Air Liquide Inc. (Newark, Delaware) will develop a technology to reduce nitrogen oxides to enable cold membrane CO₂ capture from flue gases.
• InnoSepra LLC (Middlesex, New Jersey) will demonstrate a flue gas purification process for the removal of acids, acid gases, and acid aerosols responsible for emissions.
• RTI International (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina) will test an acid wash recovery process to reduce secondary emissions from a broad set of CO₂ capture technologies.
• University of Kentucky Research Foundation (Lexington, Kentucky) will add a polishing CO₂ capture loop with hydrogen production to a post-combustion CO₂ capture technology.
• University of Kentucky Research Foundation (Lexington, Kentucky) will test approaches to remove and capture secondary emissions, including volatile compounds.

DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), under the purview of FECM, will manage the selected projects. A detailed list of the selected projects can be found here.

To support the goal of building a clean and equitable energy economy, selected project teams were required, as part of their applications, to submit a Research and Development?Community Benefits Plan. These plans provide details on their commitments to quality job creation; diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility; and benefits to disadvantaged communities as part of the President’s Justice40 Initiative.

FECM minimizes environmental and climate impacts of fossil fuels and industrial processes while working to achieve net-zero emissions across the U.S economy. Priority areas of technology work include carbon capture, carbon conversion, carbon dioxide removal, carbon dioxide transport and storage, hydrogen production with carbon management, methane emissions reduction, and critical minerals production. To learn more, visit the FECM website, sign up for FECM news announcements, and visit the NETL website.