Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) announced its intent to fund cost-shared research and development to accelerate the wide-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR)—critical components to achieve the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The potential projects will be selected under the DOE’s Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise (CarbonSAFE) Initiative, which focuses on developing geologic storage sites with capacities to store at least 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂).

Projects will be managed by FECM’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL).

CDR technologies remove CO₂ directly from the atmosphere, and CCS technologies reduce CO₂ emissions from power plants and industrial facilities by capturing the CO₂ they produce. That CO₂ can then be transported to safe and permanent storage in deep geological reservoirs. Together, CCS and CDR have the potential to eliminate hundreds of millions of tons of CO₂ per year. CCS is considered necessary to successfully decarbonize the energy and industrial sectors as they transition to a net-zero carbon economy, while CDR technologies can address emissions from the hardest to decarbonize sectors (e.g., agriculture, aviation and shipping) and eventually remove legacy CO₂ emissions from the atmosphere.
Significant advancements have been made in CCS technologies over the past two decades, scaling up both point source carbon capture and CDR technologies such as direct air capture. The funding opportunity, if released, will build upon this body of knowledge to support the assessment and verification of safe and cost-effective geologic storage of captured CO₂ at commercial-scale, with consideration to minimizing impacts to and potentially providing benefits for the environment and frontline communities.

More information on this Notice of Intent can be found here. 

FECM funds research, development, demonstration and deployment projects to decarbonize power generation and industrial sources, to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to mitigate the environmental impacts of fossil fuel use. To learn more, visit the FECM website, sign up for FECM news announcements and visit the NETL website.