Partnerships Will Help Leverage Decades of Experience to Establish an Equitable and Environmentally Responsible Technical Assistance Program

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) today announced the selection of nine university and industry-led projects to receive $44.5 million in federal funding to advance commercial-scale carbon capture, transport, and storage across the United States. These regional partnership projects will accelerate the understanding of specific geologic basins to enable the permanent storage of carbon dioxide emissions from industrial operations and power plants, as well as from legacy emissions in the atmosphere. The partnerships 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 where these projects are located. 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.

“DOE is drawing on its extensive experience in geologic carbon dioxide storage to engage and support a wide range of stakeholders in the development of specific regional-scale projects,” said Brad Crabtree, Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. “By providing valuable public information and tools, these interdisciplinary partnerships will advance the deployment of basin-scale carbon transport and storage that will enable reductions in carbon dioxide emissions throughout the U.S. economy.”

Selected projects will establish partnerships that include stakeholders with extensive technical, managerial, regulatory, and business 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.

Projects will provide a valuable public information resource for developers of carbon storage sites, local communities, and other interested parties. The nine selected project teams will perform technical assistance designed to reduce project costs and risks, improve monitoring effectiveness, build strategies for engaging with communities, and provide data to support permitting, policy development, and rulemaking:

• Battelle Memorial Institute (Columbus, Ohio)
• Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford, California)
• Carbon Solutions LLC (Okemos, Michigan)
• Texas Tech University (Lubbock, Texas)
• University of North Dakota Energy & Environmental Research Center (Grand Forks, North Dakota)
• The University of Texas at Austin (Austin, Texas)
• The University of Utah (Salt Lake City, Utah)
• University of Wyoming (Laramie, Wyoming)
• Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)

The selected project teams were required, as part of their applications, to submit Community Benefits Plans to demonstrate meaningful engagement with and tangible benefits to the communities in which these projects will be located. 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.

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.

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.