WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) today announced up to $40 million in federal funding for projects that will help advance commercial-scale carbon capture, transport, and storage across the United States to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from industrial operations and power plants, as well as from legacy emissions in the atmosphere. Specifically, the funding will provide technical, informational, and educational assistance to stakeholders involved in DOE and private sector-based carbon transport and storage projects located throughout the country, as well as to communities impacted by these projects.

These efforts support the Biden-Harris Administration's commitment to ensuring that all carbon management projects continue to be designed, built, and operated safely and responsibly, and in a way that reflects the best science and commercial practice and responds to the needs and inputs of local communities.

“The United States will need to capture, transport, and permanently store hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year to achieve net-zero emissions by midcentury,” said Brad Crabtree, Assistant Secretary of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. “To meet this goal, DOE is building on decades of experience and expertise we’ve gained through our prior regional initiatives in geologic carbon storage—leveraging unique, regional opportunities to ramp up the growth of a carbon management industry through targeted assistance, while also providing economic and environmental benefits to communities and local stakeholders.”

Through the “Regional Initiative for Technical Assistance Partnerships” funding opportunity, DOE intends to establish multidisciplinary partnerships that include stakeholders with extensive technical, managerial, regulatory, business, and social science expertise specific to carbon transport and storage. Each partnership will focus on a particular region where multiple carbon storage projects are expected to be deployed and provide project developers, regulators, community advocacy groups, labor organizations, and other affected stakeholders with objective, unbiased technical assistance within that region.

The projects will provide a valuable public information resource for developers of carbon storage sites, affected communities, and other interested parties. The selected projects will perform technical assistance designed to accomplish the following:

• Reduction of project costs and project risks.
• Reduction of monitoring costs and/or improvements in monitoring effectiveness.
• Refinement of effective strategies for engaging with communities.
• Provision of data to support permitting, policy development, and rulemaking.

Read more details of this funding opportunity announcement here. All questions must be submitted through FedConnect; register here for an account. The application deadline is January 30, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. ET.

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 National Energy Technology Laboratory website.