DOE Announces Intent to Fund Projects to Reduce Methane Emissions—a Major Contributor to Climate Change

Washington, D.C. — Today the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM), Division of Methane Mitigation Technologies, announced its intent to issue funding for research and development (R&D) projects that will help to reduce methane emissions across oil and natural gas producing regions of the United States. After carbon dioxide, methane is the most abundant greenhouse gas (GHG) warming our planet, and methane emissions contribute significantly to the GHG intensity of natural gas. Funding R&D toward a leak-tight system supports the domestic goals outlined in the Biden Administration’s U.S. Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan, which reflects an overall, global goal to cut methane emissions by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030.

The processes involved in producing natural gas as well as oil, which contains natural gas, involves several steps including separating, cleaning, transporting, and making the fluids available for end use. To minimize methane leaks, technologies for monitoring, measuring, and mitigating emissions must be developed and widely applied to every part of this infrastructure.

If funded, projects under this funding opportunity will perform research to develop new, cost-effective methane emission mitigation technologies and demonstrate advanced methane emissions monitoring systems across wide areas of oil- and natural gas-producing basins. Projects will also design an integrated methane monitoring platform that will enable early detection and improved quantification of emissions along the entire natural gas supply chain.

For more information, read the NOI here.

FECM funds research, development, demonstration, and deployment projects to decarbonize power generation and industrial production, to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and to mitigate the environmental impacts of fossil fuel production and use. Priority areas of technology work include carbon capture, carbon conversion, carbon dioxide removal, carbon dioxide transport and storage, hydrogen production with carbon management, methane emissions reduction, and critical minerals production. To learn more, visit the FECM website, sign up for FECM news announcements and visit the NETL website.