ARPA-E recently added five new topics to the “Solicitation on Topics Informing New Program Areas,” a funding opportunity (DE-FOA-0001953) that enables ARPA-E to investigate potential new program areas. The program is designed to support early stage, transformative energy technologies. New topics; approximate total amount to be awarded; and anticipated awards... Read more →

Hydrogen researchers at Graz University of Technology (Austria), together with the Graz-based start-up Rouge H2 Engineering, have developed a cost-effective process for the decentralized production of high-purity hydrogen using chemical looping. Currently, hydrogen is mainly produced centrally from fossil resources and compressed or liquefied in an expensive and energy-intensive process... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) will provide up to $22 million for research aimed at achieving breakthroughs in the effort to capture carbon dioxide directly from ambient air (DAC). The initiative encompasses two concurrent funding announcements—one by DOE’s Office of Science (SC) (LAB 20-2303) and another by DOE’s Office... Read more →

An international collaboration led by Cranfield University will examine the potential for the low-carbon production of hydrogen from natural gas. The HyPER project (Bulk Hydrogen Production by Sorbent Enhanced Steam Reforming) will construct a 1.5 MWth pilot plant at Cranfield University to test the innovative hydrogen production technology that substantially... Read more →

North Dakota-based Red Trail Energy (RTE), which since 2007 has operated an ethanol production facility with annual production of about 60 million gallons per year, is proposing sequestration of CO2 produced from starch fermentation to lower the overall carbon intensity of the fuel for the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard... Read more →

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists have identified a suite of technologies to help California to become carbon-neutral—and ultimately carbon-negative —by 2045. To achieve the goal of carbon-neutrality, California will likely have to remove on the order of 125 million tons per year of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the... Read more →

Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy has initiated a working group to develop a United States protocol for paying ranchers and farmers to store carbon in their soil. The current system for voluntary carbon transactions is broken and needs to be fixed, group founders said. The group is co-led by... Read more →

ExxonMobil and FuelCell Energy, Inc. signed a new, two-year expanded joint-development agreement to further enhance carbonate fuel cell technology for the purpose of capturing carbon dioxide from industrial facilities. The agreement, worth up to $60 million, will focus efforts on optimizing the core technology, overall process integration and large-scale deployment... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) announced $4 million in federal funding for national laboratories to collaborate with international partners on seven projects out of the 12 that were selected as a part of the Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies (ACT) Initiative. The ACT... Read more →

Researchers at MIT have developed a new, efficient way to capture carbon that addresses the inherent inefficiencies (earlier post) of incumbent technologies, due to their thermal energy losses, large footprint or degradation of sorbent material. In an open-access paper in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, they report a solid-state... Read more →

A study by Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, suggests that carbon capture technologies are inefficient and increase air pollution. His open-access paper is published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science. All sorts of scenarios have been developed under the assumption that carbon... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding $56.5 million in federal funding to 32 cost-shared research and development (R&D) projects for advanced coal technologies and research under six separate funding opportunity announcements (FOAs). The projects cover a range of topics, including carbon capture, utilization, and storage; rare earth element... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) has announced approximately $110 million in federal funding for cost-shared research and development (R&D) projects under three funding opportunity announcements (FOAs). Approximately $75M is for awards selected under two FOAs announced earlier this fiscal year; $35M is for a... Read more →

Researchers in the UK report that, with a bit of management, a largely untended slag heap could absorb significant amounts of CO2, partially offsetting the emissions from steel production. Their open-access paper is published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology. Pullin et al. Steel slag is a by-product... Read more →

ExxonMobil and Global Thermostat signed a joint development agreement to advance technology that can capture and concentrate carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources, including power plants, and the atmosphere. The companies will evaluate the potential scalability of Global Thermostat’s carbon capture technology for large industrial use. If technical readiness and... Read more →

Scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have taken the first images of carbon dioxide molecules within a molecular cage—part of a metal-organic framework (MOF), with great potential for separating and storing gases and liquids. Cryo-EM (cryogenic electron microscopy) images show a slice through... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) intends to provide up to $100 million in awards (DE-FOA-0002116) for the Coal FIRST (Flexible, Innovative, Resilient, Small, and Transformative) initiative (announced in November 2018), which aims to develop coal plants of the future that will provide secure, stable, reliable power with near-zero emissions.... Read more →

To achieve goals for climate and economic growth, “negative emissions technologies” (NETs) that remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the air will need to play a significant role in mitigating climate change, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report—“Negative Emissions Technologies... Read more →

UK-based renewable power generator Drax will pilot the first bioenergy carbon capture storage (BECCS) project of its kind in Europe, which, if successful, could make the renewable electricity produced at its North Yorkshire power station carbon negative. The demonstration project will see Drax partner with C-Capture and invest £400,000 (US$539,000)... Read more →

To better understand the near-term commercial potential for capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide, researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Stanford University have mapped out how CO2 might be captured from existing US ethanol biorefineries and permanently... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy has selected seven projects to receive approximately $44 million in federal funding for cost-shared research and development through the funding opportunity announcement, Design and Testing of Advanced Carbon Capture Technologies. The projects will target one of two areas: 1) engineering-scale... Read more →

The chief executive of Eni, Claudio Descalzi, and the chief executive of FCA, Sergio Marchionne, signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the joint development of research projects and technological applications aimed at reducing CO2 emissions from road transport vehicles. The two companies, renewing their strategic commitment to a low-carbon future... Read more →

The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) has made its first three investments, moving forward the organization’s commitments to spur the growth of promising low carbon technologies. (Earlier post.) OGCI Climate Investments is the $1-billion investment fund established last year by OGCI to invest in promising technologies and business models... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) will award up to $36 million (DE-FOA-0001791) to continue the development of carbon capture technologies to either the engineering scale or to a commercial design, with an eye to reducing fossil fuel power plant emissions. DOE is currently targeting transformational technologies that by 2030... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected two projects that will test emerging enhanced water recovery (EWR) technologies for their potential to produce useable water from CO2storage sites. The two projects were competitively selected from the five Brine Extraction Storage Test (BEST) projects awarded in September 2015. The two... Read more →

Exxon Mobil Corporation and FuelCell Energy, Inc. are pursuing novel technology in power plant carbon dioxide capture through a new application of carbonate fuel cells. The two companies said the technology could substantially reduce costs and lead to a more economical pathway toward large-scale application globally. Two years of comprehensive... Read more →

Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, have synthesized a porous liquid with the potential for application in a wide range of new, more efficient and greener chemical processes including carbon capture. The researchers in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Queen’s, along with colleagues at the... Read more →

Shell marked the official opening of the Quest carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Alberta, Canada, and the start of commercial operations there. Quest is designed to capture and safely store more than one million tonnes of CO2 each year—equal to the emissions from about 250,000 cars. Quest was... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has selected eight projects to receive almost $25 million in funding to construct small- and large-scale pilots for reducing the cost of CO2 capture and compression through DOE’s Carbon Capture Program. More than half of the funding ($15 million)... Read more →

UC Berkeley chemists have developed a new material that can efficiently capture CO2 and then release it at lower temperatures than current carbon-capture materials, potentially cutting by half or more the energy currently consumed in the process. The material, a metal-organic framework (MOF) modified with nitrogen compounds called diamines, can... Read more →

A multi-institution team of researchers has developed a novel class of materials that enable a safer, cheaper, and more energy-efficient process for removing greenhouse gas from power plant emissions. The approach, described in a paper in the journal Nature Communications, could be an important advance in carbon capture and sequestration... Read more →

The US and China jointly announced greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets. US President Barack Obama said the US will cut net greenhouse gas emissions in the US by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. At the same time, President Xi Jinping of China announced targets to peak that country’s CO2... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy will award $9 million over five years to organizations to assist it in building domestic and international consensus on future fossil energy technologies (DE-FOA-0001111). The Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) anticipates two awards being made: the first for $7 million in... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding $100 million in the second round of funding for Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs); research supported by this initiative will enable fundamental advances in energy production, storage, and use. The 32 projects receiving funding were competitively selected from more than 200 proposals.... Read more →

Synthetic fuel production from fuel-combustion-based energy and CO2 (top) and from atmospheric CO2 using solar electricity (bottom). Credit: ACS, van der Giesen et al. Click to enlarge. Researchers at the Institute of Environmental Sciences at Leiden University, The Netherlands) have concluded that the energy demand and climate impacts of using... Read more →

Particles of nitrogen-containing porous carbon polymerize CO2 from natural gas under pressure at a wellhead. When the pressure is released, the CO2 returns to gaseous form. Courtesy of the Tour Group. Click to enlarge. Scientists in the Rice University lab of chemist James Tour have developed materials that offer a... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has issued a request for information for Grand Challenges in Subsurface Engineering (DE-FOA-0001135). The purpose of the RFI is to gather information from industry, academia, national laboratories, and other federal agency stakeholders on critical subsurface knowledge and/or technology gaps that, if filled, will enable... Read more →

Researchers at MIT have devised a simple, soluble metal oxide system to capture and transform CO2 into useful organic compounds. More work is needed to understand and to optimize the reaction, but this approach could offer an easy and inexpensive way to recapture some of the carbon dioxide emitted by... Read more →

The US DOE is soliciting (DE-FOA-0001051) projects for up to $10 million in awards to target technological advancements to lower the cost of producing hydrogen and/or high-hydrogen syngas from coal for use in 90% carbon capture power generation and/or gasification-based liquid (transportation) fuel production: methanol or diesel. Liquid fuel production... Read more →

US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced a proposed $100 million in FY2014 funding for Energy Frontier Research Centers; research supported by this initiative will enable fundamental advances in energy production and use. The Department of Energy (DOE) currently funds 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs), which were selected for five-year... Read more →

KHI’s view of a “CO2-free hydrogen chain”. Source: KHI. Click to enlarge. The Nikkei reports that Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. (KHI) will build the first ocean-going ships to carry liquefied hydrogen (LH2), with plans for a demonstration test by 2017 in which liquefied hydrogen will be shipped from the state... Read more →

Researchers at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) recently conducted an online survey of driver option to determine how receptive drivers would be to adopting—and how much they might pay for—in-vehicle technology that reduce carbon emissions. The driver survey is the team’s second study on this topic; the... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) released a draft for comment of an $8-billion loan guarantee solicitation for innovative and advanced fossil energy projects and facilities that substantially reduce greenhouse gas and other air pollution. The program is part of President Obama’s climate action plan. (Earlier post.) The Advanced Fossil... Read more →

Pie chart showing mean estimates by the USGS of technically accessible storage resources (TASR) for CO2 by region. Click to enlarge. The United States has the potential to store a mean of 3,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide in geologic basins throughout the country, according to the first detailed national geologic... Read more →

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have discovered and demonstrated a new technique to remove and store atmospheric carbon dioxide while generating carbon-negative hydrogen and producing alkalinity, which can be used to offset ocean acidification. A paper on their work appears this week in the Proceedings of the National... Read more →

Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) is awarding $6.6 million to seven research teams—six from Stanford and one from Carnegie Mellon University—to advance research on technologies for renewable energy conversion to electricity or fuels and for capturing CO2 emissions and converting CO2 to fuels. The 7 awards bring the... Read more →

CCS infrastructure for six key CO2 emission prices. Sources are red and sinks are blue. The amount of CO2 captured (as a proportion of the maximum capturable amount) at each source is depicted by the dark wedges. Wedges for the sinks depict the amount of CO2 stored (as a proportion... Read more →

Proximity of the UK’s largest industrial emitters to CO2 storage sites in the North and Irish Seas. Map provided by the Energy Technologies Institute. Source: CCS Roadmap. Click to enlarge. The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has launched a new competition for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)... Read more →

Adsorption of CO2 from the air at 25 °C on FS-PEI-50 and FS-PEI-33 under dry and humid conditions. Credit: ACS, Goeppert et al. Click to enlarge. A team from the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute and Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California, reports on an improved material for capturing carbon... Read more →

A new report from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) finds that recent progress in developing and deploying low carbon technology is fragile, and advises that policy support must be stabilized globally to maintain momentum. The research was carried out in partnership with the 3C (Combat Climate Change) business leaders’ initiative.... Read more →