Solicitation Number: DE-LC-0000122
Available Funding: $155 million
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI) announced the selection of 16 projects that will enhance the capability of U.S. National Laboratories to develop technologies that improve the efficiency and competitiveness of American industry. These expanded lab capabilities will drive process and technological innovation, reduce costs, and increase prosperity for American workers and consumers.
Topic Areas
Award and cost share amounts are subject to change pending negotiations.
The selected projects will address critical industrial challenges in the following areas:
Topic 1: Energy-Intensive Industries:
Number of Awards: 7 projects
Award Amount: $65.5 million
Develop the capabilities that enable industry to create innovative solutions in the most energy-intensive sectors, such as iron and steel, cement, chemicals, forest products, and food and beverage, where novel technologies can have the greatest impact.
Project Title: Center for Advanced Cement and Concrete Technologies
Project Lead: ORNL
City/State: Oak Ridge, TN
Primary Project Partner: NLR
Federal Funding: $20,000,000
Project Description:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in collaboration with the National Laboratory of the Rockies, will establish the Center of Excellence for Advancement & Acceleration of Cement & Concrete Engineering Technologies. ACCENT’s mission is to accelerate the development and adoption of next-generation cement and concrete materials. The center will enhance existing national lab capabilities across six core areas. It will engage industrial, academic, and workforce stakeholders through a nationwide, rapid user-access model. This integrated approach aims to accelerate industry innovation, support workforce development, and translate research into market-ready solutions for the cement and concrete industry, positioning the U.S. to reduce reliance on imported material as feedstock for the domestic construction industry.Project Title: The Food & Beverage Operational Optimization and Deployment Center (FOOD Center)
Project Lead: LBNL
City/State: Berkeley, CA
Primary Project Partner: -
Federal Funding: $2,500,000*
Project Description:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will establish the Food & Beverage Operational Optimization and Deployment (FOOD) Center. The FOOD Center's mission is to catalyze innovation and enable the adoption of next-generation process and equipment technologies. The center will develop and pilot cost-effective process innovations through a two-phased, stakeholder-driven RD&D approach. It will support technologies targeting scalable solutions across the entire supply chain, including post-harvest, processing, and post-processing operations, as well as emerging areas such as controlled environment agriculture, alternative proteins, fermentation-enabled products, and smart packaging. The FOOD Center will convene stakeholders to accelerate the commercialization of sector-specific innovations by leveraging existing expertise, facilities, enabling multi-scale testing, and aligning research with industry needs. Its scalable platform supports public and private investment, enhances U.S. technological competitiveness, and drives long-term energy and cost reductions across both legacy and emerging segments of the food and beverage supply chain.Project Title: Solutions Center for Commercial Advancement of Large-scale Electrochemistry
Project Lead: LLNL
City/State: Livermore, CA
Primary Project Partner: NLR, SLAC
Federal Funding: $12,500,000
Project Description:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, alongside the National Laboratory of the Rockies and SLAC National Laboratory, will establish the Solutions Center for Commercial Advancement of Large-Scale Electrochemistry (SCCALE). Electrochemical technologies have the potential to improve the competitiveness of U.S. chemical processing by improving the productivity and selectivity of reactors, and reducing capital costs and safety risks by avoiding extreme temperatures and pressures. SCCALE's mission is to provide cross-cutting scale-up capabilities and cross-sector connections to accelerate commercial deployment across the electrochemical manufacturing industry. The center will focus on three key areas to 1) establish and grow the SCCALE industry ecosystem, including maintaining and operating existing laboratory capabilities providing technical information to industry 2) Expand capabilities to provide critical data on integrated materials performance, durability, and economic impacts, and 3) Expand capabilities to demonstrate and de-risk scale-up and process integration.
Project Title: Advanced Catalytic Reactor Innovation for Scaleup (ACRIS) Center
Project Lead: PNNL
City/State: Richland, WA
Primary Project Partner: -
Federal Funding: $500,000*
Project Description:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will establish the Advanced Chemical Reactor Innovation and Scaling (ACRIS) Center. ACRIS will accelerate catalytic process scale-up, reducing production cost for key commodity chemicals like ethylene, propylene, benzene-toluene-xylene, methanol, and ammonia. The center will address fundamental chemistry and chemical engineering challenges to thermochemical reactors. The center will evaluate groundbreaking and enabling catalytic pathways using both existing and new reactor technologies, establish performance targets and state of technology assessments, and build cutting-edge computational design tools to accelerate existing capabilities in experimental R&D, reactor modeling, and scaleup activities.Project Title: Center for Research and Advancement of Forest Product Technologies
Project Lead: ORNL
City/State: Oak Ridge, TN
Primary Project Partner: NLR
Federal Funding: $20,000,000
Project Description:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, together with the National Laboratory of the Rockies, will establish the Center for Research and Advancement of Forest product Technologies (CRAFT) to drive innovation in the forest products sector. The center will pull together capabilities from across the United States to develop and commercialize next generation pulping, chemical recovery, forming, dewatering, and drying technologies for new and established pulp and paper mills. The center will also develop smart manufacturing, digital twin, and AI tools to help U.S. mills maximize their productivity. Together with industry leaders, experts, and innovators, the CRAFT will help resolve operational challenges, develop cost-saving innovations, and revitalize the U.S. forest products industry.Project Title: National Library for Iron Ore and Scrap
Project Lead: INL
City/State: Idaho Falls, ID
Primary Project Partner: ORNL, NLR
Federal Funding: $5,000,000
Project Description:
Idaho National Laboratory along with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Laboratory of the Rockies will establish the National Library of Iron Ore and Steel Scrap. The library will serve as an iron ore and steel scrap resource center to acquire, characterize, and subdivide iron ore samples in various stages of the refinement process and various forms of scrap, enabling the critical research necessary for the future of the iron and steel industry. The library will provide a variety of well characterized accessible samples of scrap and iron ore to researchers in kilogram quantities. This will enable researchers to perform industrially relevant lab-scale experiments using real-world materials that would ordinarily require expensive and difficult multi-ton orders on the open market.
Project Title: Incubator for Critical Steel Technologies: Tramp Element Removal Innovation (TERI)Project Lead: NLR
City/State: Golden, CO
Primary Project Partner: -
Federal Funding: $5,000,000
Project Description:
The National Laboratory of the Rockies will establish the Tramp Element Removal Innovation (TERI) project as an incubator to develop innovative decopperization technologies. TERI will bring new and existing capabilities and critical expertise to demonstrate and de-risk tramp element removal technologies across pretreatment, steel melt, and postprocessing regimes – technologies that do not currently exist, but are necessary to ensure that the U.S. continues to have the ability to make high-quality steel from our significant scrap resources. To maximize the impact of the technologies, laboratory tools and resources, and associated expertise in the TERI incubator ecosystem will be available to collaborators. The project will create a lab-hosted incubator for technology developers, demonstrating technologies at the laboratory scale with clear paths for continued scaleup and commercial progression, helping to develop innovative domestic commercial capabilities to maintain the global competitiveness of the U.S. iron and steel sector.
Topic 2: Cross Sector Technologies
Number of Awards: 9 projects
Award Amount: $89.5 million
Develop the technology capabilities that enable industry to address challenges common across multiple industrial subsectors, such as industrial process heating, membrane separations, load flexibility, and advanced computing.
Project Title: Modular Testbed for High-Efficiency Thermomagnetic Processing
Project Lead: ORNL
City/State: Oak Ridge, TN
Primary Project Partner: -
Federal Funding: $2,500,000*
Project Description:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory will lead an effort to further develop and demonstrate an emerging transformative technology, thermomagnetic processing (TMP). TMP utilizes intense magnetic fields and is coupled with induction-based heating to enable better control of material microstructure and properties; producing materials with reduced processing time and improved performance. The technology has the potential to lower production costs and strengthen the domestic supply chain for ferrous and aluminum alloys, along with other materials, drive the development and scale-up of high-performance components, and advance U.S. manufacturing leadership and competitiveness.Project Title: Center of Excellence for High-Efficiency Process Heating Systems
Project Lead: ORNL
City/State: Oak Ridge, TN
Primary Project Partner: ANL, NLR
Federal Funding: $12,000,000
Project Description:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory will develop a state-of-the-art research, testing, and demonstration center of excellence that will support the development and deployment of high-efficiency process heating technologies. The center will enable standardized testing and evaluation of industrially relevant high-temperature, high-efficiency process heat components and systems to help ensure consistent and reliable evaluation of performance and improve comparability of technologies across application spaces. The project will also include a virtual lab that develops digital capabilities for design optimization, maintenance strategies, and technoeconomic analysis.Project Title: Burner Laboratories to Advance Fuel UtiliZation for Thermal Energy (BLAZE)
Project Lead: NETL
City/State: Morgantown, WV
Primary Project Partner: ANL
Federal Funding: $10,000,000
Project Description:
National Energy Technology Laboratory, in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, will establish and operate cutting-edge, industry-accessible testbed facilities dedicated to advancing the commercial adoption of fuel-flexible combustion technologies. The facilities will be designed to rigorously evaluate specialized process design and equipment demanded by the large-scale use of alternative and blended fuels. The testbeds will house multiple industrially relevant furnace configurations; activities will focus on burner technology over a range of scales, multi-burner flame interactions, safety and sensor accommodation, and materials testing – complemented by model development that can be leveraged for scale-up and adoption. By addressing key challenges, the development of innovative combustion systems will be accelerated and allow U.S. industry to employ adaptable heating solutions that strengthen their operations by reducing fuel costs through improved efficiency and bolstering stability from using varying fuel supplies.Project Title: Membrane Engineering for Manufacturing, Benchmarking, Research, Analysis, and Next-gen Evaluation (MEMBRANE) center
Project Lead: NLR
City/State: Golden, CO
Primary Project Partner: ANL, ORNL
Federal Funding: $12,000,000
Project Description:
The National Laboratory of the Rockies, in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will create a national membrane center and convene stakeholders across the membrane separations value chain to solve membrane scale-up challenges from lab to mass manufacturing. Membrane technology has the potential to help reduce energy use and costs in industrial processes by reducing or eliminating the need for energy-intensive thermal separations (distillation, evaporation), recovering useful materials from waste streams, and optimizing heating and cooling by eliminating unnecessary components from air.Project Title: Thermal Energy Storage Testbed (TESBed)
Project Lead: SNL
City/State: Albuquerque, NM
Primary Project Partner: NLR
Federal Funding: $15,000,000
Project Description:
Sandia National Laboratories will advance a thermal energy storage (TES) testbed that would leverage and expand existing infrastructure in testing an array of TES technologies. With increasingly large and varying loads at industrial sites, as well as an increasing number of energy sources from the grid and onsite resources, TES is emerging as a significant technology to ensure cost-competitive and secure industrial energy supply for thermal or electric outputs at industrial sites. In collaboration with National Laboratory of the Rockies, the grid response to industrial TES usage will be modeled to allow customers to predict the performance of integrated systems in their facilities. This modeling will help industrial end-users select the device that matches their energy needs and captures the potential cost savings that TES could provide.Project Title: Resource-secure Energy Flexibility (REFLEX): Powering a competitive future for U.S. Industry
Project Lead: LBNL
City/State: Berkeley, CA
Primary Project Partner: -
Federal Funding: $12,000,000
Project Description:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will develop and demonstrate innovative approaches for harnessing load flexibility as a strategy to cut operational costs and support rapid growth in industrial electricity usage with existing grid resource. Resource-secure Energy Flexibility (REFLEX)will feature real-world load flexibility demonstration projects in multiple applications including data centers, food distribution, automotive manufacturing, and municipal water treatment, complemented by analysis of market potential and business case support tools. To enhance their capabilities, LBNL will engage a strong network of partners, including utilities, state and local stakeholders, technology and service providers, and industry.Project Title: Center for Industrial Modeling and Simulation (CIMS)
Project Lead: LLNL
City/State: Livermore, CA
Primary Project Partner: ANL
Federal Funding: $5,000,000
Project Description:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and partners will bring together lab modeling and simulation experts with stakeholders in industry and academia to industrially relevant simulation capabilities across the national laboratory complex; provide sector-specific simulation and AI/ML expertise, resources, and tools; match industry with lab computational capabilities; and run workshops and develop detailed reports to identify computing needs and challenges for industry. By providing thought leadership and operating as a hub for national laboratory industrial computing expertise, CIMS will enable cost reductions and process improvements that fuel the competitiveness of American industry, particularly where physical experiments are too time-consuming or costly.Project Title: Data Center Cooling Collaborative
Project Lead: LBNL
City/State: Berkeley, CA
Primary Project Partner: NLR
Federal Funding: $6,000,000
Project Description:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will form a data center cooling testbed network with private and public sector partners to advance a variety of cooling technologies that reduce data center load on the grid and that ensure future high-power Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High Performance Computing (HPC) chipsets operate at peak performance; to provide reliable, flexible, and standardized user facilities; to develop testing protocols, digital twin software, and commercialization pathways; and to reduce the overall time and cost to bring these technologies to market.Project Title: Testbed for Industrial and Manufacturing Users of Power and Heat (TRIUMPH)
Project Lead: INL
City/State: Idaho Falls, ID
Primary Project Partner: -
Federal Funding: $15,000,000*
Project Description:
Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and partners will develop a modular, pilot-scale research ecosystem dedicated to advancing industrial efficiency through the integration of advanced thermal and electrical energy systems into manufacturing processes. TRIUMPH will integrate with and add testing capabilities to INL’s Energy Technology Proving Ground, including thermal energy storage and induction heating along with chemicals production, in order to validate hybrid electrothermal heating strategies under real-world conditions along with economic modeling, TRIUMPH will reduce risk and uncertainty for these next-generation energy-manufacturing systems anticipated to enhance global competitiveness for American manufacturers.