The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) announced $41.4 million in federal funding for 50 impactful projects across 17 National Laboratories to propel clean energy solutions. The funding is made available through the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) Base Annual Appropriations Core Laboratory Infrastructure for Market Readiness (CLIMR) Lab Call.
The FY24 CLIMR Lab Call is the largest amount of funding yet and represents coordinated investments from the largest set of DOE program offices.
Announced in November 2023, the FY24 TCF Base CLIMR lab call invited proposals from National Laboratories to advance energy technologies and strengthen existing practices. The TCF was established by Congress through the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and reauthorized by the Energy Act of 2020 to promote promising energy technologies. The selected projects will simplify commercialization processes, accelerate the development of existing promising technologies, and kickstart the development of new energy solutions.
OTT coordinates the TCF and strengthens DOE’s commercialization partnerships. OTT collaborated with fourteen DOE program offices for the FY2024 CLIMR lab call, including the Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO). BETO-funded CLIMR projects included:
- Decarbonizing and improving the profitability of organic waste treatment through an innovative process and value chain with lead laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and its partner, Corumat, will develop and demonstrate a cost-effective manufacturing technology to produce carbon-negative packaging material to decarbonize the packaging industry. ANL will apply its proprietary separation technology to capture organic acids from an anaerobic digester broth with lower costs and energy consumption. Corumat will deploy this technology along with their patented packaging material manufacturing technology to create a circular carbon negative packaging value chain (CCNPVC). Corumat will use the CCNPVC strategy to reduce/or eliminate solid wastes sent to landfills to reduce GHG emission and support workforce development and job opportunities in disadvantaged communities.
- Integrated processing and hydrothermal pretreatment of corn stover into a second-generation ethanol facility with lead laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory and partner laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
The goal of this Idaho National Laboratory (INL) project is to design a preprocessing system that delivers a conversion ready corn stover formulation that meets uniformity requirements for hydrothermal pretreatment that allows continuous operation. INL will build off their previous work that has demonstrated pilot-scale anatomical fractionation of corn stover and will seek characterize the resulting physical attributes of these fractions and investigate the blending of such fractions for optimal organic recovery and downstream feeding and conversion performance. This work will ultimately enhance and speed up the final design for corn stover preprocessing and pretreatment for project partner New Energy Blue who are building a 16 million gallon per year second generation ethanol facility, New Energy Freedom, LLC, in Mason City, Iowa.
View descriptions of all the DOE program offices selected CLIMR projects on the OTT project webpage.