The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced more than $2.3 billion for three efforts to advance diverse carbon management approaches that reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) pollution, address the impacts of climate change, and create good-paying jobs while prioritizing community engagement and environmental justice.

The first is a Notice of Intent (NOI) for $2.25 billion, funded by the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to accelerate geologic carbon storage projects each capable of permanently storing at least 50 million metric tons of captured CO₂ – the equivalent to the emissions from roughly 10 million gasoline-powered cars a year. In addition, DOE issued two funding opportunities, totaling $91 million, to increase the number of available CO₂ storage sites and to advance critical carbon management technologies.

Expanding commercial CO₂ storage capacity and related industries will provide economic opportunities for hard-hit communities and help deliver on President Biden’s goal of a achieving an equitable transition to a net-zero economy by 2050.  

“This past month we saw the highest levels of CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere in history, underscoring the fact that our efforts to tackle climate change will be inconsequential if we don’t act now to manage the greenhouse gas emissions that are currently putting public health and our environment at risk,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “The President’s budget commitments coupled with the investments from his Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will enable the U.S. to develop cutting-edge technologies to safely and efficiently capture, remove, and store CO₂ while revitalizing communities that have powered this nation for generations.” 

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, of which CO₂ is the primary component, have risen dramatically over the past several decades. GHGs fuel global warming, increasing the risk of droughts and floods, and putting our agriculture, health and water supply at risk. Enabling development of a suite of carbon management approaches can help reduce GHG emissions and tackle their impact on climate change.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) pathways, like direct air capture with storage, remove CO₂ pollution directly from the atmosphere to draw down the concentration of CO₂ and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies mitigate CO₂ emissions from point sources such as power plants and industrial facilities, by capturing and storing the CO₂ they produce. CCS and CDR have the potential to mitigate and remove hundreds of millions of tons of CO₂ emissions per year. 

DOE’s Carbon-cutting Investments

The following three opportunities will be managed by DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM):

• “​Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: Storage Validation and Testing (Section 40305): Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise (CarbonSAFE) Initiative: Phases III, III.5, and IV” NOI— The $2.25 billion NOI begins the process to inform stakeholders of the process for distributing investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funded CarbonSAFE Initiative which is intended to help address the feasibility, site characterization, permitting, and construction stages of CCS project development, including project siting processes that will emphasize active engagement of local communities and avoiding the imposition of additional burdens on overburdened and underserved communities. Read the NOI here.
• “CarbonSAFE: Phase II - Storage Complex Feasibility” Funding Opportunity — The $45 million funding opportunity is designed to improve procedures to safely, efficiently, and affordably define and assess onshore and offshore CO₂ storage sites at a commercial scale. Read the full funding opportunity here.
• “Carbon Management” Funding Opportunity — The $46 million funding opportunity will develop technologies to remove, capture, and convert or store carbon dioxide from utility and industrial sources or the atmosphere. Projects will examine commercial viability and technical gaps, while also examining environmental impacts and justice implications of the technologies. Read the full funding opportunity here.

DOE’s Commitment to Safe and Robust Carbon Management Solutions

Since January 2021, FECM has invested more than $210 million in 45 research and development projects and front-end engineering design studies to advance carbon management approaches including CO₂ capture, removal, and storage. This progress is essential to swiftly ramp up manufacturing and deployment in these carbon management industries to ensure successful infrastructure is in place across the nation to support a net-zero GHG emissions economy.

DOE’s Carbon Capture, Transport, and Storage Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment, part of DOE’s recently published report on securing America’s most critical supply chains, concluded that developing carbon capture and storage technologies presents opportunities for near-term job, supply chain, and CO₂ point-source capture and conversion technology growth. For example, the growth of the carbon capture and storage market could help produce between 390,000 and 1.8 million good-paying union jobs in various industries and in fossil energy communities.

The new funding efforts announced today also support the cost and performance goals of DOE’s Carbon Negative Shot initiative, which calls for innovation in carbon dioxide removal pathways that will capture CO₂ from the atmosphere and durably store it at meaningful scales for less than $100/net metric ton of CO₂-equivalent.

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 production and use. Priority areas of technology work include point-source carbon capture, carbon dioxide conversion, carbon dioxide removal, dedicated and reliable carbon storage and transport, hydrogen with carbon management, methane emissions reduction, and critical mineral production. To learn more, visit the FECM website, sign up for FECM news announcements, and visit the NETL website.