The US Department of Energy's (DoE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) has set up a federal program which will provide US$36m of financial assistance to support carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. The funds will be used to pursue the development of carbon capture technologies, either at the engineering scale or at a commercial design stage.
The idea is to foster innovation on methods for capturing carbon emissions for storage. More specifically, the selected projects will fall under two areas of interest: 4 awards with a combined funding value of US$30m will affect CCS technologies to engineering scales using existing infrastructure while 2 awards with a combined funding worth US$6m will be related to the initial engineering, testing, and design for a commercial-scale CCS projects.
This is not the first award of this kind since the DoE already announced back in December 2016 the allocation of funds worth US$44m in research and development grants to co-fund 16 carbon storage projects as part of its Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise scheme, which seeks to reduce carbon dioxide emissions associated with fossil fuel usage.