Research Experience in Carbon Sequestration (RECS)

Good morning everyone, and welcome.

I’d like to start by thanking Pam [Tomski] for her leadership of RECS, and for all of her hard work to make this program a success. 

On behalf of the Department of Energy, I want to congratulate this year’s participants.

DOE – through the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management – has supported and partnered with RECS since its beginning, and I’m honored to help kick off this year’s program.

Over the last 17 years RECS has become the premier research experience and career network for graduate students and young professionals interested in the increasingly important technology of capturing and storing carbon dioxide.

So, you’ll be joining more than 600 alumni who have benefitted from this unique one-of-a-kind program. 

Over the next several days you’ll be learning from some of the leading experts in carbon capture, utilization, removal, and storage – representing some of the best and brightest from DOE and our National Labs, as well as the private sector.

And the technologies and approaches you’ll learn about are critical as we navigate the challenges of the climate crisis.

So, for the next few minutes, I’d like to talk about why they’re critical, and highlight what the Department of Energy – and more specifically, the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management – is doing to advance those solutions.  And then I’ll be happy to take questions.

First -- some of you may know that we recently changed the name of our office from the Office of Fossil Energy to the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

This change is more than just adding two words – “carbon management” – to our name.

It reflects the fact that we’ve refocused our R&D priorities significantly to center our work on climate. And we’re striving to align our efforts to further advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s mission to cut emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030, which is less than a decade away, to produce 100% clean electricity by 2035, and to ultimately reach a net-zero US carbon economy by 2050.

This mission – and the work required to achieve it – is more urgent than ever before.

As you know, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released its sixth assessment report, and the news is sobering – absent deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, average global temperatures will exceed 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 

So, we have an urgent, but shrinking, window of opportunity to limit the harm to our planet –and especially the harm to our most vulnerable climate populations.

For our part, the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management’s mission centers around investments in technological readiness that helps ensure clean and affordable energy, while helping facilitate a just and sustainable transition toward a net-zero carbon economy. 

A lot of what we do is about managing carbon, but it’s more than just carbon – one of our 2 primary R&D offices (Resource Sustainability) is focused on limiting and cleaning up the environmental impacts of fossil fuel extraction while our second office (Carbon Management) is focused specifically on carbon – the emissions associated with power and industrial sectors in addition to legacy emissions in the atmosphere coupled to the conversion or permanent storage of CO₂ to reduce negative climate impacts.

And the recent Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will provide more than $10 billion for carbon capture, direct air capture and industrial emissions reduction – funding that will not only help us meet our climate targets, but will also open up opportunities for those who work in fossil fuel industries.

So, the carbon management part of our mission is what I want to focus on today.

Let’s look first at the power sector, where we’re focusing on carbon capture and reliable, dedicated storage. 

 

Carbon Capture

For the last 20 years or so, we’ve been focused on investments in the power sector.

And in the past five years, we’ve invested $1.2 billion to develop CCS technologies. 

During this fiscal year, we’ve invested more than $140 million in those approaches. 

And our budget request for next year is asking for a 60% increase in federal investment in research and development for carbon capture, storage, conversion, and removal – up to $368 million in 2022.

Going forward, we want to expand carbon capture into the natural gas space and in industrial sectors like ethanol and hydrogen production, and cement and steel production.

And in October we selected 12 R&D, front-end engineering design, and engineering-scale projects for carbon capture and dedicated storage on natural gas power plants and industrial facilities. 

So, we’re leveraging work we’re already doing to expand the potential of CCS and CO₂ conversion to focus more on deployment and toward the development of low-carbon products like cement, steel, chemicals, and fuels.

 

CDR

As we look at technology approaches to address the climate crisis, carbon capture, storage and conversion remains a critical and proven approach to reducing point source emissions from power plants and some industrial facilities. 

While the movement toward the deployment of carbon capture, storage, and recycling technologies is encouraging, there are still challenges – both in terms of addressing the technical, financial, and policy challenges to that deployment, and in the sheer scope of the decarbonization that will be required to meet our climate targets. 

I think it’s important to note that, if this were a decade or more ago, we could have perhaps focused on just deploying CCUS on committed emissions infrastructures. 

But we’re at a point where it’s simply too late for that.

In their recent report, the IPCC noted that it’s not enough to simply cut emissions – we have to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

And recent studies from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to the International Energy Agency reported that by 2050, we will have to remove  on the order of gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year through carbon dioxide removal methods - termed CDR – coupled to dedicated and reliable CO2 storage, achieve our net-zero carbon emissions goals.

Ultimately, nearly all climate models that show pathways to net-zero indicate the need for a near-term focus on the deployment of carbon dioxide removal from the accumulated pool of CO2 in the atmosphere in addition to point source capture coupled to dedicated storage.

In fact, IPCC modeling shows that only emissions scenarios including CDR achieve net-zero in 2050.

Getting to gigatons of CO2 removal by mid-century will require us to advance the field at an unprecedented pace.

But we shouldn’t view CDR as a method for offsetting emissions that we can avoid with existing technologies – such as decarbonizing fossil fuels – or point-source capture on industrial facilities such as cement and steel.

Rather, CDR should be viewed as a tool that counterbalances only the truly hard to avoid emissions – such as those from the agriculture or aviation sectors.

This is a challenge, but we have a unique opportunity – and a compelling responsibility – to advance carbon dioxide removal approaches to achieve decarbonization and help tackle the climate crisis.

The Department of Energy is pursuing a department-wide initiative to advance CDR pathways. 

The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management – in collaboration with other offices across the department – is playing a leading role in this effort.  We’re taking what we’ve learned through our carbon capture R&D to develop and deploy DAC technologies.

Separating CO₂ from the atmosphere has some aspects that overlap with point source capture, which has been a significant part of our office’s CCS R&D program – both in terms of the separation processes and its reliable storage.

So, as part of a broader DOE effort to advance CDR technologies, we’re leveraging a lot of the work we’ve been doing on CCS to help move the ball on direct air capture. 

Since January, we’ve invested $33 million in the research, development, demonstration, and deployment of direct air capture technologies.

In June, six projects were awarded $12 million to help create tools that will increase the amount of CO₂ captured by DAC, decrease the cost of materials, and improve the energy efficiency of carbon removal operations.

In August, we selected four additional projects to study new structured material systems and component designs for DAC technology.

We also recently announced a $14.5 million funding opportunity for front-end engineering design studies of advanced DAC systems capable of removing 5,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the air. These systems will also be suitable for long-duration carbon storage.

And to advance CDR technologies like DAC, our budget request for the coming fiscal year includes $63 million to continue our CDR research and development activities. 

But it’s not just about what we’re doing in the U.S. – global decarbonization
is essential to battling the climate crisis. 

And that’s why at COP26 last month we launched the first-ever global collaboration on carbon dioxide removal –a new Mission Innovation initiative to advance CDR approaches along a path to achieve a net reduction on the order of tens of millions of metric tons of CO2 per year globally by 2030.

 

Carbon Storage

At the same time, secure and reliable CO₂ storage is critical to helping us meet our climate goals – and carbon capture and removal approaches must be coupled with carbon storage.

The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management has a robust R&D portfolio in the carbon storage space focused on improving storage and operational efficiency – as well as our understanding of overall cost and de-risking strategies to reduce these costs. These are all critical to enabling and supporting a CCS industry that is safe, economically viable and environmentally responsible.

Our CarbonSAFE program focuses on developing geologic storage sites with capacities to store at least 50 million metric tons of CO₂.  And we plan to fund additional projects under this program.

These efforts have helped determine and characterize geological storage sites and capacity in the United States – and  advance carbon storage technologies, processes, and best practices. 

Building on those Initiatives and programs we’re aiming to expand carbon storage demonstration so that we have more projects distributed across the US and in locations where CO2 injection deep underground is feasible today.

And we’ve targeted $20 million to accelerate the regional deployment of CCS.

Our goal is to broaden the availability of certified resources for geologic storage through field projects that advance characterization and certification of storage complexes in regions that have known storage capacity – but also in regions where the storage resource potential is more prospective.

Besides geological storage, what else can you do with the captured CO₂?  Answering that question has been an important focus of our CCS R&D, and  we’re makingprogress toward the development of approaches to recycle carbon emissions.

For example, we’re

building the foundational science for the catalytic conversion of CO₂ in to fuels and chemicals. We’ve invested in novel catalysts, materials and systems from electrochemical to plasma-assisted conversion of CO₂ into the chemical building blocks of fuels and plastics.

Another promising area of R&D is the mineralization of CO₂ into mineral carbonates -- either in situ or ex situ through alkaline sources from mining. Often times with mining, there may be waste that contains alkaline-rich feedstocks like calcium and magnesium, which can react with CO2 to form a synthetic aggregate that could be used as a feedstock for road building or concrete.

Here, you’re remediating two wastes – CO2 and that produced from mining, and utilization of CO₂ into durable products with large markets enables conversion technologies to produce a meaningful climate carbon sink.

 

Conclusion

So, that’s what we’re doing the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management to help tackle the climate crisis.

But it’s not just our work that will make a difference – we’re seeing exciting movement in industry, academia, and the research community toward developing and deploying these advanced, state-of-the-art solutions to get us to net-zero.

And as we make that transition, we’ll need engineers, chemists, geologists, hydrologists, physicists and other experts to help advance and deploy the critical technologies and approaches that I’ve talked about this morning.

We hope that your RECS experience will encourage you to look closely at pursuing opportunities in carbon capture, CDR, and carbon storage because getting them in place requires all hands on deck – and we need you in this critical effort.

So, again, welcome, And I’m happy to take questions.