With private sector breakthroughs and large public investments, the carbon capture industry has reached impressive milestones in the past few years. A new funding announcement from the Department of Energy (DOE) hopes to build on this success.

DOE recently announced that it would allocate up to $304 million to four projects across the United States, spanning the power and industrial sectors. The money for these pilot projects comes from the Carbon Capture Large-Scale Pilot Projects Program, which received $937 million in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

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The first project to receive funding is located in Louisville, Kentucky on the site of PPL’s Cane Run Generating Station, a natural gas combined-cycle power plant with a capacity of 664 megawatts. Cane Run will be retrofitted with an advanced heat-integrated CO2 capture technology developed by the University of Kentucky. This system aims to capture 95% of Cane Run’s point source CO2 emissions, which is the equivalent of 90,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide or taking 20,000 cars off the road. The sequestered CO2 will then be bought by an off-taker, who has yet to be named, who will purify it for beverage-grade CO2. In total, this project will create 40-100 construction jobs. 

RTI International, International Paper (IP), SLB, and Amazon have received DOE funding for a joint venture at IP’s pulp and paper mill in Vicksburg, Mississippi. This pilot project will be the first of its kind for the paper industry. RTI’s novel non-aqueous solvent (NAS) solution—which captures CO2 in a solvent to produce only oxygen, water, and nitrogen as by-products—will aim to capture at least 90% of the Vicksburg plant’s CO2 emissions which will then be permanently stored underground. In total this project is expected to remove the carbon dioxide equivalent of 27,000 cars annually and will help companies such as Amazon more effectively reduce emissions in their supply chain. 

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Wyoming’s Dry Fork Power Station, a 405 MW coal-fired power plant near Gillette, is also one of the recipients of this round of DOE investment. TDA Research, which is leading this project in collaboration with SLB, has created a low-cost, physical adsorbent to remove CO2 via a combination vacuum and concentration swing adsorption process. This system allows a power plant to capture greenhouse gasses from its flue gasses and recycle H2 tail gasses, which still have heating value, back into the power plant’s furnace. This project is conveniently located near Wyoming’s CarbonSafe project, a permanent storage repository funded by DOE and the University of Wyoming. 

Big Spring refinery, an oil refinery located in Big Spring, Texas, is the last project to make the list. Operated by Delek US Holdings, this public-private partnership will see the refinery retrofitted with Svante Technologies’ post-combustion carbon capture process which employs filters to capture diluted industrial flue CO2 and concentrate it into a pipeline-ready carbon dioxide that can be transported and stored permanently underground. Svante’s product will be applied to Big Spring’s Fluidized Catalytic Cracking Unit, where it is anticipated to capture at least 90% of the refinery’s carbon dioxide emissions, as well as other harmful pollutants and particulate matter. 

In total, these four projects could prevent as much as 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, which is the equivalent of removing 110,000 cars from the road, according to DOE. These private-public partnerships have the potential to transition carbon capture from a relatively nascent technology with promise, to an impactful, market-ready climate solution.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.