Project Selections for FOA 3082: Carbon Negative Shot Pilots

AREA OF INTEREST 1 — Small Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage (BiCRS) Pilots

Demonstration and testing of an integrated pilot-scale BiCRS facility. Gasifying wood waste to produce hydrogen with carbon sequestration — Mote, Inc. (Los Angeles, California) plans to advance gasification technology through design, testing, fabrication and operations of an integrated BiCRS pilot project. Mote’s project will utilize wood waste in the pilot gasification system to create hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO₂) streams. The project aims to fill two important gaps: 1) demonstration of the integrated system, particularly with coupled CO₂ capture and hydrogen production, and 2) proven reliable operation of single-stage fluidized bed gasification with the specific feedstocks appropriate to BiCRS, including forest residues and other woody wastes. Additionally, the project team will focus on meaningful community engagement to garner knowledge on how BiCRS projects can best serve the communities where they are sited.

DOE Funding: $ 7,000,000
Non-DOE Funding: $ 1,750,000
Total Value: $ 8,750,000
 

ATLAS - Arbor BiCRS pilot — Arbor Energy and Resources Corporation (El Segundo, California) proposes a pilot facility to advance the readiness of a novel approach to the BiCRS modality that can store the inherent carbon in the biomass while producing power using a supercritical CO₂ power system that is integrated with a high-pressure gasifier and pure oxygen combustor. The pilot will utilize unmarketable forest waste from land management practices. Creating value for this waste based on its CO₂ trapping potential has many community benefits, including preservation of biodiversity and fire mitigation. The completion of this project will enable Arbor to reduce the technical risks to develop and deploy a commercial plant in the range of 50-70 thousand metric tons of CO₂ per year with customers from the voluntary carbon offset markets.

DOE Funding: $7,000,000
Non-DOE Funding: $8,500,000
Total Value: $15,500,000
 

Geologic Solid Carbon Storage (with Landfill Co-Benefits) — Carba, Inc. (Minneapolis, Minnesota) intends to demonstrate and assess permanent CO₂ storage as solid carbon underground in anoxic chambers. Biomass waste will be converted to charcoal using a novel, highly efficient pyrolysis reactor developed by the recipient. The charcoal will then be buried underground where it is protected from oxidative and radical/ultraviolet degradation mechanisms. The charcoal acts like a filter in the landfill, which provides additional environmental benefits such as reducing odors; purifying leachate water of toxins such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, lead, mercury, and microplastics; and reducing methane emissions. Carba will work with Waste Management to facilitate biomass handling, operations, and burial of charcoal in the landfill. The outcomes of this project will verify these benefits at a reasonable scale and develop heuristics for optimal burial. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is collaborating with Carba to assess the permanence of charcoal in these environments and develop sustainable biomass sourcing strategies. 

DOE Funding: $7,000,000
Non-DOE Funding: $3,115,198
Total Value: $10,115,198
 

Woody Biomass Burial in Appalachia — Carbon Lockdown Project Benefit LLC (Silver Spring, Maryland) plans to implement pilot biomass burial projects at three sites in the Appalachian region, demonstrating the utilization of a variety of residual biomass sources for carbon removal. The BiCRS technology to be deployed is a novel but intuitive method: wood harvesting and storage. In wood harvesting and storage, sustainably sourced woody biomass is stored underground below the biologically active surface soil layer to ensure anoxic condition (oxygen-depleted), which prevents decomposition, leading to durable storage of 1,000 years or longer. The three sites for carbon storage and wood sourcing are located at Kilby Farm, Cecil County, Maryland; Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia; and Borough of Hanover, Pennsylvania. Each site will have a net removal of 1,000 – 5,000 metric tons of CO₂ over the project period. This project will demonstrate the commercial-scale feasibility of the technology. By working with a farm, a national forest and a municipality, the project will demonstrate a new economic driver utilizing “waste” resources in an economically depressed region.

DOE Funding: $ 4,741,272
Non-DOE Funding: $1,185,318
Total Value: $5,926,590
 

Sustainable Biomass Injection for Carbon Removal and Storage — Clemson University (Clemson, South Carolina) intends to demonstrate the performance of injecting wood particles into the subsurface as a method for removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in geologic formations with high permanence. Wood particles will be used to create a slurry and injected at a depth of 10 meters or more by adapting methods that have been used for the last 30 years in the environmental industry. The injection process opens horizontal pathways that are filled with slurry, and the process is repeated many times to create thick layers of wood. Clemson University will use sawdust from a sustainable source, as certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. The project’s scale-up plan is to use wood obtained by thinning the plentiful pine forests in the southeastern United States. This will offset the drop in wood price caused by recent mill closures, which will promote forest health by encouraging landowners to adopt sound forest management practices. 

DOE Funding: $6,910,600
Non-DOE Funding: $1,772,153
Total Value: $8,682,753

AREA OF INTEREST 2 — Small Mineralization Pilots

Pilot Production and Soil Field Trial of Carbon Dioxide Removal CDR Materials Made Using a Mineral Conversion Process — Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford, California) intends to perform a pilot-scale test of a new enhanced weathering technology designed to enable rapid and scalable carbon dioxide removal in soil and durable storage as bicarbonate ions. The technology is based on a mineral conversion process that transforms magnesium silicates and calcium carbonate into a mixture of calcium silicate and magnesium oxide, a composite termed “CDR material.” The advantages of CDR material are that it weathers much faster than conventional enhanced weathering substrates like basalt or olivine, which enables it to be applied at low application rates that are agronomically preferred, and that calcium silicates are known fertilizers for numerous crops, which provides a potential value beyond carbon dioxide removal.

DOE Funding: $3,999,718
Non-DOE Funding: $1,000,270
Total Value: $4,999,988
 

Scaling up CDR from Olivine on Croplands: Cost Reductions, MRV Improvements, Safety Assurance — Eion Corp (Princeton, New Jersey) plans to conduct a pilot-scale deployment of olivine with full end-to-end implementation of a digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) platform for operationalizing terrestrial enhanced weathering. The core objective of this project is to reduce costs by using a new technique with 10 times higher accuracy at one-tenth the analysis cost and develop an optimized sampling strategy that uses instrumented field equipment and remote sensing to further lower sample density. A second objective is to quantify the value proposition of olivine as a liming agent, which is core to its adoption by farmers. A third objective is to refine a numerical model with intensive field tests. Extensive technoeconomic analysis, combined with engineering planning for an olivine mill in the State of Washington, will set the stage for demonstration-scale growth with agricultural partners after the pilot.

DOE Funding: $ 3,996,174
Non-DOE Funding: $1,003,826
Total Value: $5,000,000
 

Low-Cost & Permanent CDR at Scale: Fine-Grained Basalt Additions to Croplands with Solid, Aqueous, and Gas Phase MRV — Lithos Carbon (Dover, Delaware) will lead a carbon dioxide removal initiative by implementing enhanced rock weathering on more than 3,000 acres of agricultural land in the southeast United States, notably North Carolina. Lithos will distribute more than tens of thousands of tons of ultrafine basalt rock dust across active farmlands. This approach leverages natural geological processes to capture atmospheric CO₂ by converting it into stable soil carbonates. A rigorous soil mass-balance measurement framework will quantify carbon dioxide removal, supported by extensive soil testing and analysis. The pilot-scale project will also test a unique simulation engine coupled to a “digital twin” of geochemical mass-balance MRV that simulates cradle-to-grave geochemical data and constrains data densities to generate high-confidence carbon dioxide removal in field-scale settings. Moreover, the project is expected to enhance soil health, leading to increased crop yields, improved moisture retention, and better resistance to pests and drought, thus offering substantial co-benefits to the farming community. 

DOE Funding: $ 3,985,462
Non-DOE Funding: $999,080
Total Value: $4,984,542
 

Enabling Carbon Drawdown in the US Midwest Through Enhanced Carbonate Mineral Weathering — Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois) plans to address three primary goals: 1) demonstrate an innovative enhanced weathering mineralization methodology for removing atmospheric CO₂, which, along with CO₂ emission reductions, is necessary for limiting global warming to less than 2°C by 2100; 2) develop an essential product to help farmers durably lock away carbon as dissolved bicarbonate, improve crop yields and soil health, and receive a novel revenue stream through the provisioning of carbon credits; and 3) widely disseminate results to stakeholders, including the Department of Energy, other scientists, industrial developers, policymakers, and the public. To accomplish these objectives, the project aims to deliver efficient pilots for measuring CO₂ removal efficacy, optimize enhanced weathering practices in the Midwest, and enable multi-actor, multi-disciplinary stakeholders to understand and implement innovative systems for carbon removal and revenue generation. 

DOE Funding: $ 3,948,887
Non-DOE Funding: $1,192,721
Total Value: $5,141,608

AREA OF INTEREST 3 — Multi-Pathways CDR Testbed Facilities

Southwest Regional CDR Testbed Facility — Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of Arizona State University (ASU) (Tempe, Arizona) intends to expand their existing direct air capture testbed to include a world-class team of experts and facilities to evaluate: 1) direct air capture systems that capture CO₂ suitable for geologic storage or mineralization, 2) purpose grown and waste biomass carbon dioxide removal processed into biochar as an amendment to soils, low carbon concrete, and asphalt materials, and 3) marine carbon dioxide removal pathways. The project objectives and methods are to: 1) develop a fully-integrated, multi-pathway carbon dioxide removal testbed with a global data repository to share and compare data across different carbon dioxide removal technologies and pathways to accelerate carbon dioxide removal deployment, 2) develop a movable test skid for evaluating various direct air capture pilots at remote sites across a broad range of weather conditions integrated with mineralization or compression and transport to ASU’s pilot scale algae testbed, 3) establish a community benefits testbed to evaluate carbon dioxide removal technology’s impact on communities, integrated with environmental and economic impacts assessments to identify and mitigate deployment risks, and 4) utilize ASU’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions carbon certification framework to develop transparent carbon dioxide removal test protocol standards for the durability of carbon stored in minerals, biomass products, and oceans that will foster trust from the public, investors, and buyers in carbon credit markets.

DOE Funding: $4,999,999
Non-DOE Funding: $1,250,000
Total Value: $6,249,999
 

CDR Testbed Facility at the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) — University of North Dakota EERC (Grand Forks, North Dakota) plans to expand its existing carbon dioxide removal test facilities, which have been used by more than two dozen technology providers over the last 20 years, to facilitate carbon dioxide removal technology transition testing from laboratory-scale concepts to integrated pilot-scale carbon dioxide removal systems. The enhanced facilities will be capable of simultaneously testing multiple carbon dioxide removal pathways at up to 1,000 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent per year for more than 1,000 hours to improve efficiency and reduce cost. To bolster its extensive suite of carbon dioxide removal testbed equipment, the EERC will install additional infrastructure including but not limited to new analyzers, alternative feedstock processing equipment, and confined space gas monitors. This infrastructure will allow for parallel operation with improved data acquisition and safety and more reliable material handling. 

DOE Funding: $5,000,000
Non-DOE Funding: $1,250,000
Total Value: $6,250,000