DOE Still Throwing Money at Carbon Capture, $126M

Those still hoping clean coal will become a reality can take comfort in the knowledge that tax dollars are still funding carbon capture and sequestration endeavors. Making good on its promise to fund a number of smaller, distributed projects to test the capture and storage of carbon following the nixing of the FutureGen project, the Department of Energy has awarded $126.6 million to two regional carbon capture projects.

Of the total, $61 million will go to the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership and $65 million to the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership for two large-scale projects that will test the ability of different geologic formations to “safely, permanently, and economically store more than one million tons of carbon dioxide.” The $126.6 million will be also complemented by $56.6 million from industry partners.

The projects will test the entire CO2 injection process for large-scale — one million tons — and permanent sequestration. The DOE claims these two sites, located in California and Ohio, “are the most promising” geologic basins in the country, with the ability to store more than 100 years’ worth of North American CO2 emissions. What will it mean, then, if the “most promising” projects, which don’t have any disclosed operation dates, don’t work out? How much more time and money will the DOE invest in sweeping our carbon problems under the carpet?

Richard T. Stuebi at the Cleantech Blog provides some interesting numbers to contrast with the unfathomable claims of storing a century’s worth of carbon emissions. For instance, the average coal plants pumps out 24,000 tons of CO2 a day while the largest attempted carbon capture and storage plant only has a capture volume of 10,000 tons a day.

Carbon capture technology is being touted as an important part of President Bush’s “comprehensive efforts” to “stop greenhouse gas emissions growth by 2025.” However, looking at these numbers, the technology is still a long way off from being able to curb emissions. NASA scientist and climate change expert James Hansen, for example, has said he believes carbon capture technology for clean coal is at least a decade away.

With decades worth of coal left, figuring out how to technically and cost-effectively put carbon emissions underground is a huge market opportunity and large energy players are looking at a variety of far out methods. Cleaner coal company GreatPoint Energy is one of the most well-funded startups in the clean tech sector. ExxonMobil said this week it is putting $100 million into Controlled Freeze Zone technology, a cryogenic separation process whereby CO2 is frozen and then melted to create a liquid stream of carbon dioxide suitable for subterranean injection. Sounds like cryogenic spelunking is where Exxon thinks the future of energy is at.